Anne - A Fair Service Capacity Management for P2P Overlay Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is believed to be an efficient and economic platform for data sharing and content distribution, especially for large-sized files. In p2p overlay networks, the management of service capacity is extremely important because it affects average download time and fairness. Since the system resources of a p2p network are purely relied on user contributions, fairness becomes a primary factor of whole system performance. Through achieving fairness, users are willing to upload and contribute more resources to the system so that average download time is also reduced. In this paper, the fairness issue is studied and a fair service capacity allocation mechanism, denoted as Anne, is proposed. In Anne, the upload and download relationships of peers are formed as chains. Through properly arranging chain orders, Anne ensures that download rate of a peer is almost the same as its upload rate. Besides, an anti-cheating scheme is also included to prevent free-riders. Simulation results demonstrate that Anne outperforms not only in fairness but also in download time.