Understanding and Improving Incentives in Private P2P Communities

Incentive mechanisms play a critical role in P2P systems. Private BitTorrent sites use a novel incentive paradigm, where the sites record upload and download amounts of users and require each user to maintain its upload-to-download ratio above a specified threshold. This paper explores in-depth incentives in private P2P file-sharing systems. Our contributions are threefold. We first conduct a measurement study on a representative private BitTorrent site, examining how incentives influence user behavior. Our measurement study shows that, as compared with public torrents, a private BitTorrent site provides more incentive for users to contribute and seed. Second, we develop a game theoretic model and analytically show that the ratio mechanism indeed provides effective incentives. But existing ratio incentives in private BitTorrent sites are vulnerable to collusions. Third, to prevent collusion, we propose an upload entropy scheme, and show through analysis and experiment that the entropy scheme successfully limits colluding, while rarely affecting normal users who do not collude.