An equity-based incentive mechanism for persistent virtual world content service
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER
An equity‑based incentive mechanism for persistent virtual world content service Bingqing Shen1 · Weiming Tan1 · Jingzhi Guo1 · Peng Qin1 · Bin Wang1 Received: 11 December 2019 / Revised: 11 May 2020 / Accepted: 6 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Virtual world has the potential to become a future global electronic marketplace, integrating many isolated markets in many areas. To achieve this goal, future virtual world is required to be persistent, implying that a virtual world together with its accumulated content shall exist forever regardless of dynamic changes of its users and owners. Unfortunately, existing virtual worlds, owning by some entities, are not immune from death due to business entity failure. To provide a persistent virtual world, a decentralized architecture is explored, which is constructed on user contributed devices. However, there are many challenges to realize a decentralized virtual world. One important issue is user cooperation in reliable content storage. The devices contributed by users may not be reliable for maintaining all user contents, but users do not have the incentive to provide reliable devices for others. This paper addresses the issue by two steps. First, an indicator, called replica group reliability, is provided to users, which is based on the proposed replicability index. Based on the indicator, users can learn the reliability of their content storage. Then, a new user incentive mechanism, called equity-based node allocation strategy, is proposed to promote user cooperation to collectively maintain reliable content storage. A decentralized algorithm implementing the strategy is designed and the evaluation results show its effectiveness and efficiency. Keywords Virtual world · Content service · Persistency · Replication · Incentive · Cooperation · Reliability
1 Introduction
Bin Wang [email protected]
contents. Users can utilize their expertise and creativity to create virtual products for virtual customers [3]. Thus, persistency is an important feature, which demands that a virtual world, together with all the generated contents, exists forever regardless of any changes on virtual world owners or users. Currently, nearly all existing virtual worlds are created and owned by certain entities (often commercial companies), and user-generated contents are stored on the servers of these entities. When the entity owning a virtual world dies, bankrupts, or withdraws its operations, the affected virtual world will collapse together with the loss of its usergenerated contents. The result is that user-generated content becomes non-persistent1 and virtual world users make great loss on their virtual assets. To protect virtual world users and their virtual assets, the persistency feature of virtual worlds must be maintained. In the previous research [4], a self-organization system, called Virtual Net, has been introduced to prevent the possible collapse of virtual world and maintain the persistency featur
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