34 Desktop Grid Computing
be extended to address the fact that in practical deployments more than one
service can be traded in a peer-to-peer grid.
2.3.1 Network of Favors
The Network of Favors (NoF) is a decentralized resource allocation mecha-
nism through which participants in the peer-to-peer grid collectively encourage
service provision. The core of this mechanism is that peers use a prioritization
policy implemented through direct reciprocity when allocating its resources.
We now detail how this mechanism is implemented for the main service shared
in grids: computation. In later subsections we revisit this principle, considering
multiple services (such as data transfer and storage) are shared.
Direct reciprocity means that each participant P
i