A Credits-Based Economy for P2P Systems
Fatima Lamia Haddi, Moufida Rahmani, Mahfoud Benchaba · 2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS) · 2018
In P2P file sharing systems, providing files consumes bandwidth and spread the file. Some peers are selfish to preserve bandwidth and content and do not share files but still request them from others: their requests overwhelm and congest peers that provide files and eventually collapse the system. Incentive mechanism reduce or eliminate selfishness. We consider economy based incentive mechanisms. Credits are lent to new coming peers when they need to acquire a file without owning the necessary funds. We propose to initially allocate credits in proportion to the potential of peers rather than a fixed amount to all peers. Potential is a peer feature computed based on the number of files that indicates if a peer shares more or less compared to all other peers at joining the system. We describe the computation of the potential. Moreover, when a peer has a proportion of the price but not the full amount, the system provides additional credits. Finally, peers must redeem credits. Simulations show that fitted initial credits prevent the overuse of the system and that additional credits enhance the number of replicas of the files hence their availability.