Design of Application-Specific Incentives in P2P Networks

A rational P2P node may decide not to provide a particular resource or to provide it with degraded quality. If nodes are very likely to behave this way, or if the failure of an P2P-based application is associated with serious consequences, then usage of P2P infrastructure to support this application becomes questionable. Timely and extensive research works address this issue. These are presented and discussed in a broader survey of available strategies, tools and techniques to analyze and mitigate effects of rational behavior. We are designing an incentive mechanism for a P2P-based sharing of multimedia files. Our contribution is to incorporate application-specific characteristics into the incentive mechanism in order to improve its performance. We illustrate this approach by analyzing a collaborative file sharing protocol when various incentive mechanisms are implemented. For each such mechanism, we consider the case when it uses the application-specific characteristic, and when it does not. In this publication, we report on our preliminary findings.