Title
Understanding and Improving Ratio Incentives in Private Communities
Abstract
Incentive mechanisms play a critical role in P2P systems. Private BitTorrent sites use a novel incentive paradigm, where the sites record upload and download amounts of users and require each user to maintain its upload-to-download ratio above a specified threshold. This paper explores in-depth incentives in private P2P file-sharing systems. Our contributions are threefold. We first conduct a measurement study on a representative private BitTorrent site, examining how incentives influence user behavior. Our measurement study shows that, as compared with public torrents, a private BitTorrent site provides more incentive for users to contribute and seed. Second, we develop a game theoretic model and analytically show that the ratio mechanism indeed provides effective incentives. But existing ratio incentives in private BitTorrent sites are vulnerable to collusions. Third, to prevent collusion, we propose an upload entropy scheme, and show through analysis and experiment that the entropy scheme successfully limits colluding, while rarely affecting normal users who do not collude.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/ICDCS.2010.90
ICDCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
incentives influence user behavior,private communities,representative private bittorrent site,existing ratio incentive,in-depth incentive,improving ratio incentives,private bittorrent site,measurement study,novel incentive paradigm,effective incentive,ratio mechanism,incentive mechanism,sun,user interfaces,file sharing,computer science,game theory,robustness,bittorrent,p2p,distributed computing,entropy,maintenance engineering,bandwidth
Incentive,Computer science,Computer security,Upload,Computer network,Download,Game theoretic,BitTorrent,Game theory,User interface,Distributed computing,Collusion
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6927
978-1-4244-7261-1
26
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.09
14
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhengye Liu122610.73
Prithula Dhungel21489.18
Di Wu3122278.55
Chao Zhang417911.56
K. Ross54222390.10