This paper addresses the peer coordination problem that can occur in a federated service providing (FSP) system. The main focus is on “how to self-organize the service group structures in response to the varying service demand” for available computation resources. The authors illustrate their solution process using a labor market model that provides a social recruiting structure. The model is overlaid by a recruiting protocol that is used to regulate peer interactions that follow a policy-driven decision architecture.

While the stated problem of self-organization to meet service demands is well addressed and supported through extensive simulations under five different application scenarios, including single service, nonabundant peers, large number of peers and services, increasing robustness needs, and increased failure rates, the approach is not entirely original. For the needs of such a self-organized FSP, the scenarios are inadequately justified as complete. Moreover, several other research papers have identified and addressed this issue of peer collaboration in distributed applications. Also, the paper is not very self-contained in its notational schemes; specifically, the dot representation of the peers is neither well described nor easily understandable. In summary, if the paper were better organized, it would be good reading for someone who is not highly familiar with peer-to-peer (P2P) systems literature.