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O-Torrent: A fair, robust, and free riding resistant P2P content distribution mechanism

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Abstract

Two fundamental and persistent problems that still confront BitTorrent are unfairness and free riding. This paper proposes O-Torrent, a P2P content distribution mechanism that is derived in principal from BitTorrent. O-Torrent deploys the concept of unidirectional transfers among groups of peers who are arranged in rings. Each peer in O-Torrent can construct one ring and admit peers to it. A peer who constructs a ring becomes its father and hence its administrator. O-Torrent is fair, each peer must upload and participate in the sharing process in order to download. It implements an effective Serve/Request incentive mechanism which enhances the robustness of the mechanism. Furthermore, our results suggest that O-Torrent performs more effectively in punishing free riding behavior and provides better performance than BitTorrent.

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Notes

  1. Assuming that the ring contains a complete copy of the content and thus the request will be directly fulfilled. Otherwise, the peer keeps requesting a segment he is missing until his request is fulfilled.

  2. Blacklisting is not applied on aged peers in the ring.

  3. Initially, the peers in this phase of the simulation are connected to 5 rings and 5 peers for O-Torrent and BitTorrent respectively.

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Correspondence to Manaf Zghaibeh.

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Zghaibeh, M. O-Torrent: A fair, robust, and free riding resistant P2P content distribution mechanism. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 11, 579–591 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-017-0563-7

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