A decision-theoretic approach to file consistency in constrained peer-to-peer device networks

As users interact with an increasing array of personal computing devices, maintaining data consistency across those devices becomes more difficult. Typical solutions assume access to centralized servers, continual connectivity, or unbounded storage and CPU capacity. In practice, users' devices vary widely in capabilities, use intermittent or sparsely-connected networks and incur (asymmetric) transfer costs. We present a multi-agent system built upon a decision-theoretic approach to constructing and executing multiple plans to achieve consistency in a peer-to-peer, partially observable, non-deterministic environment. We analyze the performance in comparison to a standard epidemic replication algorithm.