A Willing-to-Share Based Incentive Mechanism for File Sharing P2P Networks

In peer-to-peer file sharing networks, files can be regarded as public goods. Based on the economic game theory, we firstly analyze the performance of file sharing in P2P networks in this paper, and demonstrate that being free-rider is the best strategy for most users without external incentives. Furthermore, another factor is considered in our research that each user has its own willingness to share the file resources (willing-to-share) which is his private information unobserved by other users. Based on these premises, we design an incentive mechanism to induce all users to share the file as many as possible according to his true willingness. In this mechanism, users are inspired to provide commons by taxing them. The correctness and efficiency of this mechanism have been proved by mathematic. At the end of this work, a logical P2P management system has been proposed to make this mechanism running