BitTorrent's Dilemma: Enhancing Reciprocity or Reducing Inequity

BitTorrent's Dilemma: Enhancing Reciprocity or Reducing Inequity

Jia, L. (TU Delft Dataintensive Systems)
d' Acunto, L. (TU Delft Dataintensive Systems)
Meulpolder, M. (TU Delft Dataintensive Systems)
Pouwelse, J.A. (TU Delft Dataintensive Systems)
Epema, D.H.J. (TU Delft Dataintensive Systems)

Kolberg, M (editor)

2011

Enhancing reciprocity has been one of the primary motivations for the design of incentive policies in BitTorrent-like P2P systems. Reciprocity implies that peers need to contribute their bandwidth to other peers if they want to receive bandwidth in return. However, the over-provisioning that characterizes today’s BitTorrent communities and the development of many next-generation P2P systems with real-time constraints (e.g., for live and on-demand streaming) suggest that more effort can be devoted to reducing the inequity (i.e., the difference of service received) among peers, rather than only enhancing reciprocity. Inspired by this observation, in this work we analyze in detail
several incentive mechanisms that are used in BitTorrent systems, and explore several strategies that influence the balance between reciprocity and equity. Our study shows that (i) reducing inequity leads to a better overall system performance, and (ii) the behavior of seeders (i.e., peers that hold a complete copy of the file and upload it for free) influences whether reciprocity is enhanced or inequity reduced.

Thin film transistors
Bandwidth
Analytical models
Peer to peer computing
Protocols
Channel allocation
Steady-state

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:da9c6edf-4e15-4251-8c2c-b072bc2e9cc5

https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2011.5766581

IEEE Society, Los Alamitos, CA

978-1-4244-8790-5

IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC '11)

IEEE CCNC '11, 2011-01-08 → 2011-01-12, Los Alamitos, CA, USA

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2011 L. Jia, L. d' Acunto, M. Meulpolder, J.A. Pouwelse, D.H.J. Epema