Reciprocal resource sharing in P2P environments

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems enable users to share resources in a networked environment without worrying about issues such as scalability and load balancing. Unlike exchange of goods in a traditional market, resource exchange in P2P networks does not involve monetary transactions. This makes P2P systems vulnerable to problems including the free-rider problem that enables users to acquire resources without contributing anything, collusion between groups of users to incorrectly promote or malign other users, and zero-cost identity that enables nodes to obliterate unfavorable history without incurring any expenditure. Previous research addresses these issues using user-reputation, referrals, and shared history based techniques. Here, we describe a multi-agent based reciprocity mechanism where each user's agent makes the decision to share a resource with a requesting user based on the amount of resources previously provided by the requesting user to the providing user and globally in the system. A robust reputation mechanism is proposed to avoid the differential exploitations by the free-riders and to prevent collusion. Experimental results on a simulated P2P network addresses the problems identified above and shows that users adopting the reciprocative mechanism outperform users that do not share resources in the P2P network. Hence, our proposed reciprocative mechanism effectively suppresses free-riding.

Incentives for P2P Fair Resource Sharing

“…In our work, we don't expect nodes to report their own contribution but, instead, consider the near past interactions of nodes and evaluate their contribution through this. Banerjee et al [4] consider a reciprocation strategy and use expected utility, based also on past interactions, as a decision function. However, the collection and maintenance of the history of the past interactions between peers is not precised.…”

“…Once registered, sites can ask for resources by a call to send-request with the type of resource they wish to get 4 , and the recipient of the request. The recipient is the one to which the request is sent unless another site is under test, in which case it is privileged to receive the request.…”

Robust Agent Communities

“…P2P systems are vulnerable to problems including free-riding users who utilize resources without contributing in turn, collusion between groups of users to falsely promote or malign other users, and zero-cost identity problem that allows nodes to obliterate unfavorable history without incurring any expenditure. We used a reciprocity-based mechanism to tackle these problems [5]. We assume each node in the P2P network is managed by a self-interested agent.…”

Cooperation and fair resource allocation in communication networks

“…As far as we know, no previous work has attempted to encompass all the above under a common design framework. Some existing policies do not account for peers of different capability profiles ( [1,2,8,10,12,20]), some do not account for peers of different request generation profiles ( [1,7,9]) and some do not account for peers of different demands ( [1,2,8,[10][11][12]20]). …”

“…Apart from the market-based model, the only studies, as far as we know, that deal with the ex-change of multiple services are [2] and [20] which base on reciprocity mechanisms and are described in detail in section 2.5. However, both schemes face the same limitations.…”