Inspection games for selfish network environments

Current distributed information system consider only typical fault-tolerance techniques for re-liability issues. Selfish peers, which deviate from the collaborative protocol to increase personal benefit, may also harmfully affect the goals of networked architectures. Securing the collaborative protocol would be an option, however, this may not be always possible or wanted. Then, a post-hoc assessment, deployed by the system designer, could monitor the correct behaviour of the participants without affecting the actual system’s functioning. Due to limited resources, a complete monitoring is not possible: typically monitoring is done by sampling by sampling so that misbehaviour in some case can go undetected. At the same time, a selfish peer’s decision to violate also depends also on the monitoring rate of the inspecting parties. This forms an interdependent interaction landscape, which corresponds to a class of games known as Inspection Games. In this paper, we discuss the practicability of Inspection Games for networked architectures for system analysis and design. To this end, develop generalized Inspection Game versions up to m inspectors and n inspectees, starting from a simple two-player game; we further provide solutions (i.e. Nash equilibria) for all games. Afterwards, these games and solutions are adapted towards an application to networked architectures. This is done by extending them to the possibility of false negatives (the performed inspection on a player’s behaviour does not detect a deviation from the protocol which has actually occurred, due to the intrinsic failability of the inspection technique).