Trust-Based Community Formation in Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks

Decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can benefit from forming interest-based communities that can provide peers with information about the resources shared in the community and collectively computed rating of their quality as well as about the agents in the community and their reputation. We propose a mechanism for forming communities in a P2P system for sharing academic papers. The mechanism requires each agent to compute its trust in the agents with whom it interacts. A simulation shows that such communities can benefit peers.