An Incentive Scheme for Optimizing Network Performance in Structured P2P Networks

Most structured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks assume that all nodes in the network are altruists. However, as the networks grow larger, they may include many selfish nodes, which leech resources from the network without contributing any in return. Therefore, the behaviors of selfish nodes will compromise the network performance. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed incentive scheme based on the concept of market, to encourage the cooperative behaviors and optimize the network performance concurrently. In the market, service providers price their services and allocate their bandwidth resource rationally for providing service, in order to maximize their revenues. Service consumers have the freedom to select the providers and have to pay for the services they consume. We prove that the optimal network performance can be achieved if each service provider uses appropriate service pricing and bandwidth allocation mechanism. Furthermore, our scheme provides incentive to encourage the use of such mechanism. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.