Abstract

Conventional Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks do not provide service differentiation and incentive for users. Therefore, users can easily access information without contributing any information or service to a P2P community. This leads to the well known "free-riding" problem and consequently, most of the information requests are directed toward a small number of P2P nodes which are willing to share information or to provide service, hence, the "tragedy of the commons" occurs. The aim of this paper is to provide service differentiation based on the amount of services each node has provided to a P2P community. Since the differentiation is based on the amount of contribution, this encourages all nodes to share information/services in a P2P network. We first introduce a resource distribution mechanism for all information sharing nodes. This mechanism is a distributed in nature and has a linear time complexity and guarantees the "Pareto-optimal" resource allocation. In addition, the mechanism not only distributes resources in a way to increase the aggregated utility of the whole network, but also provides incentive for nodes in the P2P network to share information. Secondly, we model the whole resource request/distribution process as a competition game between all competing nodes. We show that this game has a Nash equilibrium. To realize this game, we propose a protocol such that all competing nodes can interact with the information providing node such that the Nash equilibria can be reached efficiently and dynamically. We also present a generalized mechanism which provides incentive for nodes having heterogeneous utility functions. Convergence analysis of the competition game is carried out. Examples are used to illustrate that the incentive protocol provides service differentia...

Citations