Optimal Peer Selection in a Free-Market Peer- Resource Economy

In a P2P free-market resource economy a client peer may want to select multiple server peers for either downloading a file or streaming a stored audio or video object. In general, multiple server peers will make the object available, with each peer offering a different price. The optimal peer selection problem is to select from a subset of the peers those peers that can provide the service at lowest cost. In this paper we formulate and solve the problem of optimally selecting a subset of peers for parallel downloading and for parallel streaming.