Engineer - Incentive Models For Contributing Storage Resources H/F INRIA

Engineer - Incentive models for contributing storage resources
Le descriptif de l'offre ci-dessous est en Anglais
Type de contrat : CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé : Thèse ou équivalent

Fonction : Ingénieur scientifique contractuel

Contexte et atouts du poste

This engineer position will be in the context of Alvearium challenge (https://project.inria.fr/alvearium/), a project between Hivenet, Coast, Magellan, Pesto and Wide Inria teams. The engineer will be located at Inria Nancy-Grand Est in Loreley team and will be visiting Hivenet offices in Cannes.

About Hivenet:

Hivenet intends to play the role of a next generation cloud provider in the context of Web 3.0. Hivenet aims to exploit the unused capacity of computers to offer the general public a greener and more sovereign alternative to the existing clouds where the true power lies in the hands of the users. It relies both on distributed peer-to-peer networks and on the end-to-end encryption of data.

About Inria Center of the University of Lorraine:

The Inria Center of the University of Lorraine is one of Inria's nine centers and has twenty project teams, located in Nancy, Strasbourg and Saarbrücken. Its activities occupy over 400 people, scientists and research and innovation support staff, including 45 different nationalities. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institutes, etc.

Mission confiée

Hivenet experiences significant churn, with nodes -representing users' storage resources- frequently joining and leaving the network without warning. We plan to explore an incentive model that encourages clients to contribute storage resources and sustains their availability over time.

The candidate will study client behavior when using Hivenet platform. This will be done by analysing traces of anonymized communications of clients with the Hivenet platform in order to extract user behavior - when the clients join, use and leave the platform. This analysis can be complemented with interviews of several clients of Hivenet to confirm the observed patterns.

The candidate will study the literature on incentive mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks [1]. A particular attention will be given to incentives used in blockchain-based approaches.
For instance, Filecoin couples markets (storage/retrieval) with collateral and verifiable storage: Proof-of-Replication (PoRep) to ensure unique storage per copy and Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSt) to audit ongoing availability; slashing for faults/missed proofs aligns incentives under churn [2, 3].

An incentive mechanism will be proposed, implemented and evaluated by means of simulations.

1. Ihle, C. & Trautwein, D. & Schubotz, M. & Meuschke, N. & Gipp, B., "Incentive Mechanisms in Peer-to-Peer Networks - A Systematic Literature Review", ACM Computing Surveys,
Jan. 2023, DOI: 10.1145/3578581.
2. Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network, https://caladex.io/api/files//papers/File%20coin%20white%20paper.pdf
3. Juan Benet, David Dalrymple, Nicola Greco, Proof of Replication, Technical Report, https://www.filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

Principales activités

- Analysis of churn in Hivenet platform based on anonymized communication traces in Hivenet platform (1 month)
- Interviews of some Hivenet clients (2 months)
- Study of incentive mechanisms in the literature (2 months)
- Proposal of an appropriate incentive mechanism for Hivenet platform (3 months)
- Implementation of the incentive mechanism (2 months)
- Evaluation of the proposed incentive mechanism by means of simulations (2 months)

Compétences

- PhD in Computer Science
- Fundamentals of Distributed systems
- Good programming skills
- Good collaborative and networking skills, excellent written and oral communication in English
- Strong analytical skills

Rémunération

From 2692€ gross/month according to experience andqualifications