Collaboration-based distributed systems are becoming more prevalent these days. Two such systems are Community Clouds, where a large number of anonymous private users share their computational resources within the community, and smart grids, a distributed modernized electrical grid. Albeit with differences in ultimate goals, these two systems share many specifications and requirements such as decentralization, pay-as-you-go mechanism, reliability, scalability, availability and security. We argue that a model inspired by the two collaborative systems, with relevant common traits, is a good starting point to sketch the big picture of an economics-driven approach to make collaboration between them. We define a comprehensive economic model as key step towards managing and driving negotiation and resource arbitration, within and among both collaborative distributed systems. The main factors affecting such an economic model are QoS, cost effectiveness and energy efficiency, accounting for their interdependencies that strengthen and weaken each other in different cases. Towards such an economic model, we devise a cost model that controls the level of collaboration or resource sharing among vicinities, via community currency, which enables trading through converting local currencies and managing exchange taxes.

Peer Reviewed