Can bandwidth sharing be truthful?

Abstract

Peer to peer (P2P) and Crowd Sourcing systems have built their success on resource sharing protocols such as Bit Torrent and Open Garden. While previous studies addressed the issue of fairness, we discuss prevention of manipulative actions a player may lie to take the advantage of the protocols. We prove that, under a proportional response protocol, a player deviating from the protocol by reporting false broken links will not make any gain in its utility eventually. This result establishes the strategic stability of a popular resource sharing P2P system in the Internet.