In PUEs, we consider a scenario in which a group of users are located within each other's spatial proximity and are open to cooperate and share services and applications. However, some basic questions may arise here; why the user wants to extends his PUE in order to accommodate the other users, what he is interested in and more importantly, what he would be able to get after forming the PN-F with other users and what price the user may have to pay for these services. These questions would be answered and discussed throughout this section. We base our discussion around three fundamental stances outlined in the following:
Before the Cooperation Begins
The PUE of a user first constitutes his own devices and services available in his PN. The user is the sole authority to extend his PUE (to form a PNF) in order to accommodate the services and the devices available to other users in their own PNs. However, before really moving towards cooperating and forming groups, the user first looks at his motivation to cooperate. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics said, "Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way". In terms of cooperative groups, if the user feels satisfied with the services he has in his own PN, no desire to cooperate and to from groups will come on his way. The user shall only devise ways into cooperation when he looks for some service which his own PN (current PUE) can not offer. The user's intent to cooperate can be classified in several ways: purpose-driven cooperation vs. opportunity-driven cooperation, short-lived cooperation vs. longer-term cooperation and proactive cooperation vs. reactive cooperation.
Purpose-driven cooperation means that the cooperative strategies are explicitly defined beforehand, whereas opportunity driven means that the users cooperate spontaneously when interesting circumstances to do so arise. In both cases, and especially in the second case, information about the user's context/environment/activities can play an important role. Next, depending on the lifetime of the cooperative groups, we can make the distinction between very short-lived cooperation and longer term cooperation. This distinction will have its implications on the complexity of the solutions to establish the cooperative groups. In the case of short-lived cooperative groups, solutions to setup and manage the cooperation need to be lightweight and simple. Longer term cooperation open up much more opportunities to introduce more complex and powerful management and definition mechanisms. Finally, based on the way the cooperation process is carried out, both proactive and reactive cooperative groups are possible. Proactive implies that the cooperative groups are established in anticipation of the use of the common goals or services provided by the cooperation strategies of each group user. Last but not the least, reactive cooperative groups are established upon request or when the opportunity arises.
Formation of Cooperative Groups
In precise terms, a cooperative group is a function of cooperation strategies defined by each participant of the group. First the group members define their local strategies and exchange them with the other members. The exchange of strategies is similar to negotiation between the end-users i.e. what each of the user wants to provide and consume as a part of the cooperative group. For instance, as shown in Figure 1, there are three distinct PNs who want to form a cooperative group (a PN Federation). Before forming thegroup, they negotiate on the terms and conditions of the PN-F. As an outcome of this negotiation, all of the potential cooperative group (PN-F) members converge at a certain point (a group of strategies), referred in Figure 1 as "convergence" point. Once the convergence point is attained i.e. the common strategies for the cooperative groups are defined, and further on the cooperative groups are actually formed.
Cooperative groups may vary on different scales such as age, profession, liking, needs, culture, so on and so forth. Therefore it is very less likely at times that they converge on a single point. The derivation of common strategies for the entire group gets more complicated and nontrivial with the increase in number of members of the cooperative group. Moreover, even if they finally converge to certain agreed upon strategies of the group, the time it would take to form a group would be considerably very high. Therefore, it would be quite efficient that the some group members converge on some strategies and does not converge on others. It is also possible that the cooperative group defines one single strategy as a "general" strategy for the group and other "specific" strategies for cooperation among group members. To this end, a cooperative group can have multiple convergence points. As shown in Figure 1, PN-1 defines two disjoint convergence points with each of the other PNs (i.e. PN-2 and PN-3) in the group. In concrete service terms, the cooperative group is formed by the PN-1 to consume/provide service to each of the other PNs, whereas other PNs i.e. PN-2 and PN-3 might not be interested in each others services. Therefore, in order for the group to achieve its goal, the convergence points of PN-1 with other PNs are essential. However, in this case, a much complex problem is to provide a secure and efficient interface between each of the convergence points defined within the scope of the cooperative groups. Moreover, during the lifetime of the cooperative group, due to the dynamism of the group and its members, the individual strategies can change. This dynamic nature of the group would certainly have its effect on the restructuring and reformation of the global group strategies. In this respect, coping up with the dynamism in the cooperative group environments is also a hard nut to crack.
Sharing Strategies in Cooperative Groups
In order to fully understand the sharing strategies in cooperative groups, it could be interesting to see how the economics of cooperation works in the society. Cooperation refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition. In the society, we cooperate when we want to accomplish something that we can not achieve working alone. In contrast, sometimes we cooperate not for obvious short-term benefits but for long-term gains. For instance, User A relays the traffic of User B so that in future, User B would be in a position to ask User A to relay his traffic. This type of cooperation involves the business, cultural and relationship development aspects. Even, sometimes in the society people cooperate just for social reasons and no obvious quantitative gains. Whatsoever the reason behind the cooperative behaviors is, the cooperation does not come for free and we always have to pay a certain price for it. The cost and the gains of cooperation can take many forms ranging from resources (man, money, machines) to moral and ethical support, referred as the potential of cooperation.
Even if all members of a group benefit from the cooperative group, individual self-interest may not favor cooperation. This theory of non-cooperative behaviors for self-interest in a cooperative group is referred as "prisoner's dilemma". There can be several reasons to be non-cooperative in a group. One of the major reasons is associated with the utility of being the part of the group. Everyone wants to have the best thing under the cost constraints he has. Therefore, the user would be cooperative to a certain limit where he sees that his total utility of being cooperative is greater or equal to the cost he is paying as a part of the cooperative group. Since the total utility and associated cost is associated with the satisfaction of the user, once the cost bypasses the total utility the user's satisfaction starts decreasing, and he becomes egoist or less cooperative member of the group.
No comments:
Post a Comment