File-sharing costs and quality-of-service
A. Tangpong, George Kesidis · 2010
The presence of high-volume file-sharing activity on the Internet has caused reconsideration of purely flat-rate pricing for bandwidth in some access networks through the use of dynamic differential service priorities for protocol-agnostic (application-neutral) congestion control. We study how BitTorrent-style file-sharing depends on flat-rate pricing. A simple deterministic game-model of BitTorrent incentives is formulated focusing on relative uplink bandwidth allocations for transactions (block swaps) between leecher peers. Our cost model for uplink allocation is a ramp function, where one leecher's ramp has a larger interval of zero cost (the limited ¿flat-rate¿ region) than that of a leecher with a tendency to allocate less uplink bandwidth. For some simple cases, how the game converges to the boundary stationary (Nash equilibria) region is shown.