Who Is Going to Be the Next BitTorrent Peer Idol?

Active measurement studies show that the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing protocol Bit Torrent is highly under attack. Moreover, malicious peers can easily exploit the original seeding algorithm and therefore reduce the efficiency of this protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel seeding algorithm that requests peers to vote for their best sharing peers. Our results show that this incentive mechanism makes Bit Torrent harder to exploit without losing performance. In some situations our algorithm even outperform other seeding algorithms. The peer exchange - that comes as a side effect - reduces the dependency on a centralized tracker and increases the robustness and the efficiency. We studied the effectiveness of our approach in a real testbed comprising 32 peers.