Content recommendation and service costs in swarming systems

Recommendation systems and the performance of computer network systems have fundamental implications over each other. While recommendation systems impact system performance, the latter can be used to guide the former. In this paper, we study the interconnections between recommendation systems and the performance of the network. Focusing on swarming systems à la Bittorrent, we propose an analytical model to capture the revenue and the cost to a content provider as a function of the quality of its recommendations and the cost to serve the content. The model is then used to suggest heuristics on how to recommend content accounting for service costs and user preferences.