Rescuing Tit-for-Tat with Source Coding

Tit-for-tat is widely believed to be the most effective strategy to enforce collaboration among selfish users. However, it has been shown that its usefulness for decentralized and dynamic environments such as peer-to-peer networks is marginal, as peers can rapidly end up in a deadlock situation. Many proposed solutions to this problem are either less resilient to freeloading behavior or induce a computational overhead that cannot be sustained by regular peers. In contrast, we retain tit-for-tat, but enhance the system with a novel form of source coding and an effective scheme to prevent peers from freeloading from seeding peers. We show that our system performs well without the risk of peer starvation and without sacrificing fairness. The proposed solution has a reasonably low overhead, and may hence be suitable for fully distributed content distribution applications in real networks.