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A Taxonomy of Incentive Mechanisms in Peer-to-Peer Systems: Design Requirements and Classification

Authors:
Kan Zhang
Nick Antonopoulos
Zaigham Mahmood

Keywords: Peer-to-Peer; Free riding; Incentive Mechanism; GameTheory; Simulator; Instrinsic motivation

Abstract:
Free riders in the Peer-to-Peer systems are the nodes that only consume services but provide little or nothing in return. They seriously degrade the fault-tolerance, scalability and content availability of the Peer-to-Peer systems. The solution to this problem in Peer-to-Peer networks is to have incentive mechanisms that aim to improve the network utility by influencing the nodes to be more cooperative. This paper presents seven design requirements according to the characteristics of Peer-to-Peer systems, latest distributed computing development trends and implementation techniques. This paper also provides a classification of the existing incentive mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer systems. For each category, the paper outlines the principles, provides typical examples, applications and discusses limitations against proposed design requirements. Two approaches to evaluate the effectiveness of the incentive mechanism are also presented. The findings suggest that the reciprocity-based incentive mechanisms are the most promising solutions. It is suggested that future research direction could focus more on the internal factors that encourage cooperation.

Pages: 196 to 205

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 5, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644