Managing Supply and Demand of Bandwidth in Peer-to-Peer Communities
Michel Meulpolder · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2011
On today's Internet, millions of people participate in peer-to-peer communities where they share content such as audio and video files. Contrary to websites such as Youtube, which rely on large and expensive computer servers to store and deliver all of their content, peer-to-peer communities rely on storage and delivery by the PCs of the users themselves. Because of this, a peer-to-peer community can only be successful if there are enough users willing to provide content and bandwidth to others, enabling a balance between supply and demand. This thesis provides practical and theoretical insight into the characteristics of supply and demand in peer-to-peer communities. It contains an analysis of the mechanisms at various layers of the peer-to-peer spectrum from the protocol level to the community level, as well as the design of a new incentive mechanism called BarterCast. Equipped with BarterCast, a user's peer-to-peer software can create an opinion of the past behavior of unknown identities by relying on information that has been 'gossiped' around, just like our sense of reputation in real life.