Modeling Analysis and Improvement for Free-Riding on BitTorrent-like File Sharing Systems

  • Authors:
  • Jiadi Yu;Minglu Li;Jie Wu

  • Affiliations:
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China;Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China;Florida Atlantic University, USA

  • Venue:
  • ICPPW '07 Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

BitTorrent has emerged as a very popular peer-topeer file sharing system, which uses an embedded set of incentive mechanisms to encourage contribution and prevent free-riding. However, the capability BitTorrent has of preventing free-riding needs further study. In this paper, we present a fluid model with two different classes of peers to capture the effect of free-riding on BitTorrent-like systems. With the model, we find that BitTorrent's incentive mechanism is successful in preventing free-riding in a system without seeds, but may not succeed in producing a disincentive for free-riding in a system with a high number of seeds. The reason for this is that BitTorrent does not employ an effective mechanisms for seeds to effectively guard against free-riding. Therefore, we propose a seed bandwidth allocation strategy for the BitTorrent system to reduce the effect of seeds on free-riding. Finally, simulation results are given, which validate what we have found in our analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.