Designing incentives for peer-to-peer routing

Abstract— In a peer-to-peer network, nodes are typically required to route packets for each other. This leads to a problem of “free-loaders,” nodes that use the network but refuse to route other nodes’ packets. In this paper we study ways of designing incentives to discourage free-loading. We model the interactions between nodes as a “random matching game,” and describe a simple reputation system that provides incentives for good behavior. Under certain assumptions, we obtain a stable subgame-perfect equilibrium. We use simulations to investigate the robustness of this scheme in the presence of noise and malicious nodes, and we examine some of the design trade-offs. We also evaluate some possible adversarial strategies, and discuss how our results might apply to real peer-to-peer systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Alberto Blanc, Yi-Kai Liu, Amin Vahdat
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2005, Peer-to-peer Network, Random Matching Game, Stable Subgame-perfect Equilibrium