Single-hop friends recommendation and verification based incentive for BitTorrent

Abstract

Free riding, the behavior of attempting to benefit resources contributed by others while sharing their own values as minimum as possible, is one of the key problems in many P2P systems. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism based on single-hop friends' recommendation and verification to improve the performance of BitTorrent. Peers figure out non-free-riders from their personal experience and friends' recommendation and verification, and optimistic unchoke one peer which is randomly selected from non-free-riders during its optimistic unchoke period. With the help of the modified seed unchoke algorithm, the proposed incentive mechanism prevents the free riding behavior and the collusion of malicious peers effectively. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.