Free riding: a new challenge to peer-to-peer file sharing systems

An Adaptive Reputation-based Trust Framework for Peer-to-Peer Applications

“…Ramaswamy and Liu [14] discussed the free riding problem that infests many peer-to-peer systems. They proposed an incentive system that is aimed at keeping peers on the network to share their files based on three characteristics: the amount of files shared, the amount of data the peer has shared, and the popularity of the shared file.…”

“…proposed a micro-payment mechanism [7] to encourage file sharing in P2P systems. Ramaswamy and Liu also discussed using utility functions [14] to measure the usefulness of the users. Although our purpose is not to solve free-riding and achieve fairness in P2P systems, we use the same idea to solve the second problem, i.e., users should give rewards or incentives to the resources that provide satisfactory services.…”

Incentive Mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer Systems

“…Our micropayment protocol with fixed pricing is similar to theirs. More recently, Ramaswamy and Liu use utility functions to measure the usefulness of peers, e.g., the number of files, the total size of the data, and the popularity of the files, and describe a utility based scheme to control free riding in peer-to-peer systems [9]. Both of the above approaches study the free riding problem in P2P file sharing systems, while we focus on the referral systems, in which the prices of services can be either fixed or dynamic.…”

“…Since users do not benefit directly from sharing files with others, many users choose to decline the requests from others. Free riding is found in many P2P systems but is not punished [4,9]. For example, in Gnutella, there is a significant amount of free-riding users.…”

Counteracting free riding in Peer-to-Peer networks

“…Free riding causes several negative side effects. In a free riding environment, a small number of peers serve a large number of peers; many download requests are directed towards a few serving peers and this may lead to scalability problems [3]. This also leads to a more client-server like paradigm [8,9] and adversely affects P2P network advantages.…”