Incentives for P2P Fair Resource Sharing

We consider the problem of fair resource sharing to optimize the performance of resource sharing in peer to peer systems. Resource sharing systems currently face rational peers which may exhibit a variety of strategies including: no participation, also referred as free-riding, and greedy behavior. The first aspect has been extensively studied in the late years, while the second one has not received much attention. The broad class of proposed solutions focuses on designing incentives to reward cooperative peers. The side effect of these incentives is twofold: the system load is not balanced and the resource potential of the system is not fully exploited. The P2P fair resource sharing aims at both balancing the load and maximizing the use of system resources. The contribution of our work is twofold. First, we specify the P2P fair resource sharing problem and propose a mechanism to solve it in large scale dynamic networks with rational users. Our mechanism is composed of a novel incentive (i.e. fair cooperation) and an algorithmic part encapsulated in a middleware layer. Second, we propose an architecture for our mechanism middleware layer including four distributed services that bring together several research area: aggregation, semantic group membership and tracking. Finally, we implement our mechanism using a peer-to-peer unstructured model and evaluate it through simulations