RACOON : A Framework for the Design of Accountable Selfish-Resilient Cooperative Systems Technical Report

A challenge in designing a cooperative distributed system is to ensure that the system is able to tolerate selfish nodes that strategically deviate from their specification whenever doing so is convenient. In this paper, we propose RACOON, a framework for the design of cooperative systems that are resilient to selfish behaviours. While most existing solutions target specific systems or types of selfishness, RACOON proposes a generic and semi-automatic approach that achieves robust and reusable results. Also, RACOON supports the system designer in the performance-oriented tuning of the system, by proposing a novel approach that combines Game Theory and simulations. We illustrate the benefits of using RACOON by designing two cooperative systems: a P2P live streaming and an anonymous communication system. In simulations and a real deployment of the two applications on a testbed comprising 100 nodes, the systems designed using RACOON achieve both resilience to selfish nodes and high performance.