PeerVote: A Decentralized Voting Mechanism for P2P Collaboration Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems achieve scalability, fault tolerance, and load balancing with a low-cost infrastructure, characteristics from which collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, can benefit. A major challenge in P2P collaboration systems is to maintain article quality after each modification in the presence of malicious peers. A way of achieving this goal is to allow modifications to take effect only if a majority of previous editors approve the changes through voting. The absence of a central authority makes voting a challenge in P2P systems. This paper proposes the fully decentralized voting mechanism PeerVote, which enables users to vote on modifications in articles in a P2P collaboration system. Simulations and experiments show the scalability and robustness of PeerVote, even in the presence of malicious peers.