Mobile Clouds: Exploiting Distributed Resources in Wireless, Mobile and Social Networks

7

Cooperative Principles by Nature

No instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others!

Charles Darwin (1859)

Cooperation is the process of working and interacting together aiming to achieve individual or common goals. Cooperation is present in our daily life, and ultimately, it is the basis of our society. Cooperation arises not only among humans but it is a widespread phenomenon in nature. Human cooperation is governed by intricate rules and patterns of behavior, much more complex that the cooperation arising in other species. Cooperation in the animal kingdom, being somewhat simpler though highly efficient, has often served as an inspiration source for many developments in engineering. Many cooperative strategies in the animal world can be particularly useful when applied to a group of user–controlled nodes (i.e., mobile devices) such as those in a mobile cloud. This chapter considers, through several examples, cases of cooperation in Nature, and how these can be used to derive basic rules of cooperation. The goal of this chapter is to motivate the reader to identify and exploit cooperative strategies for mobile clouds by finding some connections between cooperation found in Nature and cooperation arising among a group of cooperative mobile users. This chapter also discusses game theoretical approaches particularly motivated by the influential work of Robert Axelrod.

7.1 Introduction

In this chapter ...