The Internet presents itself not as a single network or homogeneous space, but as a set of interwoven networks and communities. Thus, every forum or newsgroup on the internet creates a community.
The same is true for software developers, software users and Internet network operators. In these communities, participants interact in the form of queries. In a forum, requests take the form of questions directed at other members.
In a free software project, the coordinators will ask the community developers to improve the current version. (Add new features, fix bugs)
Requests may also come from software users who will report bugs or flaws in existing programs.
At the network operators level, requests relate to the handling of data or traffic. An operator may request an interconnection with another operator. That is, it can request access to its network and some of its bandwidth.
In this paper, too, we develop a general model of community interaction for the Internet that is implemented quite well.
At the core of requests, we consider a community of interacting agents. A demand is defined as a demand for services rendered by an agent to one or more agents.
When an agent agrees to process this request, it therefore provides a service to the sender of the request. The agent may also refuse to process. This selection is based on a cost-benefit calculation.
If he accepts, he will need to make an individual effort to process the request. If he refuses, the message is destroyed or returned to the sender. This refusal and delay in processing the request expressly penalizes the issuer.
Indeed, the result of this demand has a direct benefit to the issuer or allows it to develop services and applications. Any delay results in loss of profit or uselessness for the latter.
If the requested agent agrees to process the request, it bears an individual cost corresponding to the effort and time required to respond. This is the net cost of any individual earnings the broker may derive from this activity.
For example, the agent may gain new skills and a reputation to develop within and outside the community.
If the expected individual gains are greater than the effort costs, the agent has no reason to refuse to answer the questions.
However, in most cases the net cost is positive and may cause the broker to refuse to process the request.
We also know that this cost differs from one broker to another. We assume that it reflects the heterogeneity of skills and query processing abilities.
According to the hypothesis, the cost of processing requests is consistently distributed within the community, according to a law of density.
This is a distribution function. The sender of the request knows this distribution. However, he does not know the cost specific to each broker. Given this incomplete information, the issuer is always at risk of seeing their claims denied.
If all low-cost agents agree to respond positively to the request, it is equated to the probability of rejection.
In case of refusal, the time required to reformulate the claim and send it to a new representative constitutes a loss or uselessness for the issuer.
The shorter the delay to send a request, the lower the loss of earnings associated with the rejection.
Refusing to process a request punishes not only the sender, but also, to some extent, the rest of the community. The processing of this request may directly or indirectly be of interest to any intermediary, especially if the intermediaries make use of derived services or applications.
Similarly, refusing to process a request can cause congestion or clutter that affects the entire community. The sender will have to renew its claim to other intermediaries who cannot devote themselves to other claims.
For these various reasons, an agent may incur a cost or ineffectiveness for refusing to process a request.
For example, if a developer refuses to fix a bug or write a program for a piece of software, he will be penalized as a user of that software.
He knows that his rejection will slow down the software development process. Similarly, let's talk about a network operator that refuses to interconnect with another network operator. It reduces the fluidity of traffic on the Internet and can be subject to disturbances.
A demand is therefore characterized by the degree of interest it arouses among other members of the community. In certain claims, the issuer and the requested intermediaries may have the same interests and derive the same benefit from their processing.
Conversely, other requests may only be of interest to the sender, and their processing does not benefit other members of the community in any way.
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