Sharing Incentives for Lazy Free-Riders in BitTorrent and the BarterCast Reputation System

A well-known problem in peer-to-peer networks is free-riding, where users do not share resources in return for what they consume. Free-riders can be distinguished in two categories: diehard free-riders that are willing to subvert the network’s protocol in order to free-ride, and lazy free-riders that are reluctant to share but do follow the...

Incentivizing Seeding In BitTorrent - Indirect Interaction as an Incentive to Seed

BitTorrent has turned into the most popular P2P file sharing protocol and is used for various purposes such as Video on demand and Media Streaming. The fundamental problem with P2P networks in general is that quality of service highly depends on altruistic resource sharing by participating peers. Many peers freeride on the good intentions of...

Merging the best of HTTP and P2P

The World Wide Web is growing fast. Web content is growing as well. To cope with this trend, server infrastructures must be able to serve a huge amount of traffic. When this cannot happen, service denial is the consequence. Small content publishers are the most affected by this phenomenon. At the same time, BitTorrent is leading the file sharing...

Managing Supply and Demand of Bandwidth in Peer-to-Peer Communities

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...

Peer-to-Peer System Design: A Socioeconomic approach

It has gradually become clear that Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems should not be conceived in the manner of conventional computing systems. Consequently, over the years, ideas from social science in general and economics in particular have made their way to P2P systems to deal with the novel challenges that such systems throw up. In Chapter 2 of this...

Challenges, Design and Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand Systems

A Robust Distributed Reputation Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Systems

In P2P content distribution networks, incentive mechanisms are required for sustainable operation of the network. In general, there are two classes of incentive mechanisms, direct and indirect. In direct mechanisms, a content consumer compensates the work of a supplier by providing him some content in return. In indirect mechanisms, the work of...

Online Networks as Societies: User Behaviors and Contribution Incentives

Online networks like email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, eBay, and BitTorrent-like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have become popular and powerful infrastructures for communication. They involve potentially large numbers of humans with their collective inputs and decisions, and they often rely on the cooperation and the contribution of their users...

Tribler Play: Decentralized media streaming on Android using Tribler

The amount of people using smartphones to access shared content has rapidly grown in the last couple of years. Popular services to share the media all rely on a client/server model, which have scalability issues and are prone to censorship. A decentralized approach would make censorship more difficult and growth more sustainable. Thus the main...

User contribution in peer-to-peer communities

Credit Mining: An Incentive and Boosting System in a Peer-to-Peer File-sharing Network

Since the dawn of BitTorrent technology, free-riding has always been a critical<br/>issue restricting the performance and availability of the BitTorrent network. To solve this problem, BitTorrent involves a tit-for-tat mechanism which does not function satisfactorily against free-riding. Private trackers implement credit systems to eliminate...