Increasing QoS in selfish overlay networks

A routing overlay network is an application-layer overlay on the existing Internet routing substrate that allows an alternative routing service. Recent studies have suggested that such networks might contain selfish nodes, which develop their strategies by considering only their own objectives. Extremely selfish nodes, called free-riders, might even refuse to share their resources with the network, thus making overlay service unavailable to the nodes that depend on them. The authors use a game-theoretic approach to evaluate the selfish-node mechanism and increase quality of service (QoS) by detecting and excluding free-riders.