Abstract
The fundamental problem with P2P networks is that quality of service depends on altruistic resource sharing by participating peers. Many peers freeride on the generosity of others. Current solutions like sharing ratio enforcement and reputation systems are complex, exploitable, inaccurate or unfair at times. The need to design scalable mechanisms that incentivize cooperation is evident. We focus on BitTorrent as the most popular P2P file sharing application and introduce an extension which we refer to as the indirect interaction mechanism (IIM). With IIM BitTorrent peers are able to barter pieces of different files (indirect interaction). We provide novel game theoretical models of BitTorrent and the IIM mechanism and demonstrate through analysis and simulations that IIM improves BitTorrent performance. We conclude that IIM is a practical solution to the fundamental problem of incentivizing cooperation in P2P networks.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Buragohain, C., Agrawal, D., Suri, S.: A game theoretic framework for incentives in P2P systems. In: IEEE Conf. on Peer-to-Peer Computing (2003)
Cohen, B.: Incentives build robustness in BitTorrent. Technical report (2003), bittorrent.org
Douceur, J.R.: The Sybil Attack. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, pp. 251–260. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Feldman, M., Lai, K., Stoica, I., Chuang, J.: Robust incentive techniques for peer-to-peer networks. In: Proc. of the 5th ACM Conf. on Electronic commerce, pp. 102–111 (2004)
Feldman, M., Papadimitriou, C., Chuang, J., Stoica, I.: Free-riding and whitewashing in peer-to-peer systems. In: Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Practice and Theory of Incentives in Networked Systems, pp. 228–236 (2004)
Guo, L., Chen, S., Xiao, Z., Tan, E., Ding, X., Zhang, X.: Measurements, analysis, and modeling of bittorrent-like systems. In: Proc. of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM Conf. on Internet Measurement (2005)
Hales, D., Rahman, R., Zhang, B., Meulpolder, M., Pouwelse, J.: Bittorrent or bitcrunch: Evidence of a credit squeeze in bittorrent? In: 18th IEEE Int. Workshop on Enabling Technologies (2009)
Jun, S., Ahamad, M.: Incentives in bittorrent induce free riding. In: P2PECON 2005: Proc. of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, pp. 116–121 (2005)
Kamvar, S.D., Schlosser, M.T., Garcia-Molina, H.: The eigentrust algorithm for reputation management in P2P networks. In: Proc. of the 12th Int. Conf. on World Wide Web, pp. 640–651 (2003)
Legout, A., Liogkas, N., Kohler, E., Zhang, L.: Clustering and sharing incentives in bittorrent systems. In: Proc. of the 2007 ACM Int. Conf. on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, pp. 301–312 (2007)
Legout, A., Urvoy-Keller, G., Michiardi, P.: Rarest first and choke algorithms are enough. In: Proc. of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM Conf. on Internet measurement, pp. 203–216 (2006)
Levin, D., LaCurts, K., Spring, N., Bhattacharjee, B.: Bittorrent is an auction: analyzing and improving bittorrent’s incentives. In: Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Conf. on Data Communication, pp. 243–254 (2008)
Locher, T., Moor, P., Schmid, S., Wattenhofer, R.: Free riding in bittorrent is cheap. In: SIGCOMM 2006 (2006)
Marti, S., Garcia-Molina, H.: Taxonomy of trust: categorizing P2P reputation systems. Computer Networks 50(4), 472–484 (2006)
Meulpolder, M.: Managing supply and demand of bandwidth in peer-to-peer communities. PhD thesis, Delft University of Technology (March 2011)
Meulpolder, M., D’Acunto, L., Capota, M., Wojciechowski, M., Pouwelse, J., Epema, D., Sips, H.: Public and private bittorrent communities: A measurement study. In: IPTPS 2010 (2010)
Meulpolder, M., Pouwelse, J., Epema, D., Sips, H.: Bartercast: Fully distributed sharing-ratio enforcement in bittorrent. Technical report, Delft University of Technology; Parallel and Distributed Systems Report Series (2008)
Milinski, M., Semmann, D., Krambeck, H.-J.: Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Nature 415(6870), 424–426 (2002)
Nisan, N., Roughgarden, T., Tardos, E., Vazirani, V.V.: Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems. In: Algorithmic Game Theory, ch. 27. Cambridge University Press (2007)
Noroozian, A.: Incentivizing seeding in bittorrent - indirect interaction as an incentive to seed. Master’s thesis, Delft University of Technology (2010)
Nowak, M.A., Sigmund, K.: Evolution of indirect reciprocity. Nature 437(7063), 1291–1298 (2005)
Piatek, M., Isdal, T., Anderson, T., Krishnamurthy, A., Venkataramani, A.: Do incentives build robustness in bittorrent. In: NSDI 2007 (2007)
Qiu, D., Srikant, R.: Modeling and performance analysis of bittorrent-like peer-to-peer networks. In: Proc. of the 2004 Conf. on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications, pp. 367–378. ACM, New York (2004)
Rockenbach, B., Milinski, M.: The efficient interaction of indirect reciprocity and costly punishment. Nature 444(7120), 718–723 (2006)
Roozenburg, J.: Secure decentralized swarm discovery in Tribler. Master’s thesis, Delft University of Technology (2006)
Sigmund, K., Hauert, C., Nowak, M.A.: Reward and punishment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98(19), 10757–10762 (2001)
Sirivianos, M., Park, J.H., Chen, R., Yang, X.: Free-riding in bittorrent networks with the large view exploit. In: 6th Int. Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (2007)
Yu, J., Li, M., Wu, J.: Modeling analysis and improvement for free-riding on bittorrent-like file sharing systems. In: Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing Workshops (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Noroozian, A., de Weerdt, M., Witteveen, C. (2013). Incentivizing Cooperation in P2P File Sharing. In: Cao, L., Zeng, Y., Symeonidis, A.L., Gorodetsky, V.I., Yu, P.S., Singh, M.P. (eds) Agents and Data Mining Interaction. ADMI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7607. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36288-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36288-0_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36287-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36288-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)