RACOON++: A Semi-Automatic Framework for the Selfishness-aware Design of Cooperative Systems

Challenge in designing cooperative distributed systems is to develop feasible and cost-effective mechanisms to foster cooperation among selfish nodes, i.e., nodes that strategically deviate from the intended specification to increase their individual utility. Finding a satisfactory solution to this challenge may be complicated by the intrinsic characteristics of each system, as well as by the particular objectives set by the system designer. Our previous work addressed this challenge by proposing RACOON, a general and semi-automatic framework for designing selfishness-resilient cooperative systems. RACOON relies on classical game theory and a custom built simulator to predict the impact of a fixed set of selfish behaviours on the designer’s objectives. In this paper, we present RACOON++, which extends the previous framework with a declarative model for defining the utility function and the static behaviour of selfish nodes, along with a new model for reasoning on the dynamic interactions of nodes, based on evolutionary game theory. We illustrate the benefits of using RACOON++ by designing three cooperative systems: a peer-to-peer live streaming system, a load balancing protocol, and an anonymous communication system. Extensive experimental results using the state-of-the-art PeerSim simulator verify that the systems designed using RACOON++ achieve both selfishness-resilience and high performance.