Exchanging User Profiles to Connect Peers in Distributed Systems

In this paper we introduce a user profile exchange mechanism, called barter or trading without money, that does not make use of countable resources in a dynamic information retrieval environment. We consider a network of inter-connected users, who behave both as information consumers and producers, within a multi-agent system which operates in a peer-topeer fashion. Our aim is to get a fast and efficient information resource management (maximum profit) using a network topology as simple as possible (minimum cost), for a given set of user restrictions (limited memory and period of waiting).