An Incentive Security Model to Provide Fairness for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract: Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to rely on resources of their own users. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Early P2P networks did not use proper mechanisms to manage fairness. However, after seeing difficulties and rise of freeloaders in networks like Gnutella, the importance of providing fairness for users have become apparent. In this paper, we propose an incentive based security model which leads to a network infrastructure that lightens the work of Seeders and makes Leechers to contribute more. This method is able to prevent betrayals in Leecher-to-Leecher transactions and more importantly, helps Seeders to be treated more fairly. This is what other incentive methods such as Bittorrent are incapable of doing. Additionally, by getting help from cryptography and combining it with our method, it is also possible to achieve secure channels, immune to spying, next to a fair network. The simulation results clearly show that how our proposed approach can overcome free-riding issue. In addition, our findings revealed that our approach is able to provide an appropriate level of fairness for the users and can decrease the download time.