MalikCredit - A New Credit Unit for P2P Computing

The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm operates in an uncontrolled voluntary environment and, as the shared resources contributed by the general public have no legal obligation with respect to resource provisioning, an incentive based approach is needed to motivate and encourage participants to continue with the project and attract new volunteers. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), one of the most widely used middleware platforms in P2P systems, has devised an Accounting System to provide incentives to the project participants in order to attract more participants and retain existing ones. The primary incentive provided by the BOINC Accounting System is the award of 'credits', which themselves have no monetary value. However, one of the problems with the credit system is the use of significantly inconsistent performance results obtained from the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks for calculating credits. This study analyses the existing BOINC Credits calculation system and proposes a new credit unit - MalikCredits - based on a more consistent synthetic lightweight benchmark - MalikStone, which is specifically designed for the dynamic challenges of the P2P paradigm. The results of this newly proposed credit calculation system have highlighted its superiority over the BOINC Credit calculation system in terms of consistency.