Abstract

Over the past decade, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing and streaming systems have evolved as a cheap and effective technology in distributing content to users. Guaranteeing a level of performance in P2P systems is, therefore, of utmost importance. However, P2P file-sharing and streaming applications suffer from a fundamental problem of unfairness, where many users have a tendency to free-ride by contributing little or no upload bandwidth while consuming much download bandwidth. By taking away an unfair share of resources, free-riders deteriorate the quality of service experienced by other users, by causing slower download times in P2P file-sharing networks and higher stream updates ’ miss rates in P2P streaming networks. Previous attempts at addressing fair bandwidth allocation in P2P, such as BitTorrent-like systems, suffer from slow peer discovery, inaccurate predictions of neighboring peers ’ bandwidth allocations, under-utilization of bandwidth, and complex parameter tuning. We present FairTorrent, a new deficit-based distributed algorithm that accurately rewards peers in accordance with their contribution in a file-sharing P2P system. In a

Citations