The Gnutella protocol requires peers to broadcast messages to their neighbours when they search files. The message passing generates a lot of traffic in the network, which degrades the quality of service. We propose using social networks to optimize the speed of search and to improve the quality of service in a Gnutella based peer-to-peer environment. Once peers generate their "friends lists", they use these lists to semantically route queries in the network. This helps to reduce the search time and to decrease the network traffic by minimizing the number of messages circulating in the system as compared to standard Gnutella. We demonstrate by simulating such an environment with the JADE multi-agent system platform that by learning other peers' interests, building and exploiting their social networks (friends lists) to route queries semantically, peers can get more relevant resources faster and with less traffic generated, i.e. that the performance of the Gnutella system can be improved.
(team course project for CMPT 862 - Multi-Agent Systems, 2002)
The successful deployment of multi-agent systems (MAS) with human users
in the real world requires taking into account the social dynamics in
the environment. That is why researchers are becaming increasingly interested
in sociological aspects,for example, describing existing relationships
among people in organizational structures and adapting the functionality
of MAS systems to these structures. While there is a lot of research of
user cooperation in organizations, there is not much work on emerging
cooperation among users within MAS applications, where users do not know
each other from the beginning, have no existing organization to define
roles and processes and yet the users need to cooperate in order to exchange
services and resources. Examples of such multi-agent, multi-user environments
are multi-player games, newsgroups and discussion forums, peer-to-peer
file sharing or computation resource sharing applications, e-learning
environments.
User attitudes play an important role in such cooperation. We are interested
specifically to find out how people develop attitude of liking or disliking
other people and how one changes his/her attitude towards other people
to reciprocate their perceived attitudes towards him/her.