Peer-to-peer file sharing game using correlated equilibrium

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become more and more popular in nowadays by providing decentralized, self-organizing and fault tolerant file sharing services. As the selfish users do not benefit from providing free service, they tend to download files from other users and yet not to upload for the others, resulting in low system efficiency. In this paper, we propose a correlated equilibrium-based file sharing game to enhance users´ performance. We first characterize users´ utility with their expected delay. Then, using the correlated equilibrium concept, instead of optimizing their own benefits alone, the users are aware of the best response for them to jointly optimize their strategies together and achieve the correlated equilibrium. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.