On the Effectiveness of Punishments in a Repeated Epidemic Dissemination Game

This work uses Game Theory to study the effectiveness of punishments as an incentive for rational nodes to follow an epidemic dissemination protocol. The dissemination process is modeled as an infinite repetition of a stage game. At the end of each stage, a monitoring mechanism informs each player of the actions of other nodes. The effectiveness of a punishing strategy is measured as the range of values for the benefit-to-cost ratio that sustain cooperation. This paper studies both public and pr...