Researches on inhibition mechanism in P2P networks

A peer-to-peer (P2P) system will starve from resource if every user acts as a free rider who only takes resources from the system but never contributes. While developing a scheme, it is also important to inhibit free riders besides incentivizing users to contribute resources. In this paper, we adopt game theory to explore behaviors of nodes in P2P networks and present a Tit-for-Tat based mechanism. The reputation of one node is scored dispersedly and stored locally by its counterparts, according to its past reactions to their requests. Experimental results have prove that free riders are inhibited effectively since it takes more time for them to download resources than altruistic nodes.