FairTrust: Toward secure and high performance P2P networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are becoming increasingly popular and are an exciting new class of innovative, internet-based resource sharing systems. In a P2P network, a reputation system is essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behaviors. The system collects locally-generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield the global reputation values to represent peer trustworthiness. Reputation system guides peers in choosing a server for services/resources. Most of the approaches for peers to exploit reputation metrics are to select the one with the highest reputation value as a providing server. However, it may lead to unexpectedly low efficiency for high-reputed peers, and prevents P2P networks from taking full advantage of all resources for high performance. Other approaches restrict a peer to select a server in the same or lower reputation values. However, these approaches prevent P2P networks from achieving their goal of widely resource sharing and service exchanges. In this paper, we introduce a trust-based fairness-oriented server selection policy, FairTrust, for a peer to choose another peer to interact. FairTrust takes into account both reputation and capacity factors in server selection. It helps to create a secure P2P communication environment, and meanwhile to take full advantage of system resources for high performance by fair load distribution. Simulation results show the superiority of the FairTrust policy in achieving both high security and high performance in P2P networks in comparison with other related policies.