One Hop Reputations for Peer to Peer File Sharing Workloads

An emerging paradigm in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is to explicitly consider incentives as part of the protocol design in order to promote good (or discourage bad) behavior. However, effective incentives are hampered by the challenges of a P2P environment, e.g. transient users and no central authority. In this paper, we quantify these challenges, reporting the results of a month-long measurement of millions of users of the BitTorrent file sharing system. Surprisingly, given BitTorrent's popularity, we identify widespread performance and availability problems. These measurements motivate the design and implementation of a new, one hop reputation protocol for P2P networks. Unlike digital currency systems, where contribution information is globally visible, or tit-for-tat, where no propagation occurs, one hop reputations limit propagation to at most one intermediary. Through trace-driven analysis and measurements of a deployment on PlanetLab, we find that limited propagation improves performance and incentives relative to BitTorrent.

[1]  Michael Sirivianos,et al.  Free-riding in BitTorrent Networks with the Large View Exploit , 2007, IPTPS.

[2]  Venkata N. Padmanabhan,et al.  Analyzing and Improving a BitTorrent Networks Performance Mechanisms , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[3]  S. Buchegger,et al.  A Robust Reputation System for P2P and Mobile Ad-hoc Networks , 2004 .

[4]  Emin Gün Sirer,et al.  KARMA : A Secure Economic Framework for Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing , 2003 .

[5]  Jun Wang,et al.  TRIBLER: a social‐based peer‐to‐peer system , 2008, IPTPS.

[6]  Yu Peng,et al.  Robust incentives via multi‐level Tit‐for‐Tat , 2008, IPTPS.

[7]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  Do incentives build robustness in bit torrent , 2007 .

[8]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  The Eigentrust algorithm for reputation management in P2P networks , 2003, WWW '03.

[9]  Mostafa H. Ammar,et al.  A reputation system for peer-to-peer networks , 2003, NOSSDAV '03.

[10]  John R. Douceur,et al.  The Sybil Attack , 2002, IPTPS.

[11]  Thomas E. Anderson,et al.  Leveraging BitTorrent for End Host Measurements , 2007, PAM.

[12]  Vinod M. Prabhakaran,et al.  On the Role of Helpers in Peer-to-Peer File Download Systems: Design, Analysis and Simulation , 2007, IPTPS.

[13]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  PPay: micropayments for peer-to-peer systems , 2003, CCS '03.

[14]  B. Cohen,et al.  Incentives Build Robustness in Bit-Torrent , 2003 .

[15]  Himabindu Pucha,et al.  Exploiting Similarity for Multi-Source Downloads Using File Handprints , 2007, NSDI.

[16]  Eytan Adar,et al.  Free Riding on Gnutella , 2000, First Monday.

[17]  R. Srikant,et al.  Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks , 2004, SIGCOMM '04.

[18]  Stefan Schmid,et al.  Free Riding in BitTorrent is Cheap , 2006, HotNets.

[19]  Ling Liu,et al.  PeerTrust: supporting reputation-based trust for peer-to-peer electronic communities , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[20]  Ernesto Damiani,et al.  Choosing reputable servents in a P2P network , 2002, WWW.

[21]  Eddie Kohler,et al.  Clustering and sharing incentives in BitTorrent systems , 2006, SIGMETRICS '07.