  We investigate how different preservation policies ranging from least
aggressive to Most aggressive affect the level of preservation achieved by
autonomic processes used by smart digital objects (DOs). The mechanisms used to
support preservation across different hosts can be used for automatic link
generation and support preservation activities by moving data preservation from
an archive centric perspective to a data centric preservation. Based on
simulations of small-world graphs of DOs created using the Unsupervised
Small-World algorithm, we report quantitative and qualitative results for
graphs ranging in size from 10 to 5000 DOs. Our results show that a Most
aggressive preservation policy makes the best use of distributed host resources
while using one half of the number of messages of a Moderately aggressive
preservation policy.
