Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent?
by Michael Piatek, Tom Isdal, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkatramani, Tom Anderson
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| url: | http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/piatek/papers/BitTyrant.pdf | | abstract: | A fundamental problem with many peer-to-peer systems
is the tendency for users to “free ride”—to consume resources
without contributing to the system. The popular
file distribution tool BitTorrent was explicitly designed to
address this problem, using a tit-for-tat reciprocity strategy
to provide positive incentives for nodes to contribute
resources to the swarm. While BitTorrent has been extremely
successful, we show that its incentive mechanism
is not robust to strategic clients. Through performance
modeling parameterized by real world traces, we
demonstrate that all peers contribute resources that do
not directly improve their performance. We use these results
to drive the design and implementation of BitTyrant,
a strategic BitTorrent client that provides a median 70%
performance gain for a 1 Mbit client on live Internet
swarms. We further show that when applied universally,
strategic clients can hurt average per-swarm performance
compared to today’s BitTorrent client implementations. | | type: | misc |
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