Decentralized group formation

Abstract

Imagine a network of entities, being it replica servers aiming to minimize the probability of data loss, players of online team-based games and tournaments, or companies that look into co-branding opportunities. The objective of each entity in any of these scenarios is to find a few suitable partners to help them achieve a shared goal: replication of the data for fault tolerance, winning the game, successful marketing campaign. All information attainable by the entities is limited to the profiles of other entities that can be used to assess the pairwise fitness. How can they create teams without help of any centralized component and without going into each other’s way? We propose a decentralized algorithm that helps nodes in the network to form groups of a specific size. The protocol works by finding an approximation of a weighted k-clique matching of the underlying graph of assessments. We discuss the basic version of the protocol, and explain how dissemination via gossiping helps in improving its scalability. We evaluate its performance through extensive simulations.