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 addresses this issue. The state-of-the-art dealing with rational nodes comprises trust and reputation networks, as well as methods based on game theory and mechanism design. These are presented and discussed in a broader survey of available strategies, tools and techniques to analyze and mitigate effects of rational behavior. We designing an incentive mechanism for 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 the performance of 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.