Market Design for a P2P Backup System

Peer-to-peer (P2P) backup systems are an attractive alternative to server-based systems because the immense costs of large data centers can be saved by using idle resources on millions of private computers instead. This paper presents the design and theoretical analysis of a market for a P2P backup system. While our long-term goal is an open resource exchange market using real money, here we consider a system where monetary transfers are prohibited. A user who wants to backup his data must in return supply some of his resources (storage space, upload and download bandwidth) to the system. We propose a hybrid P2P architecture where all backup data is transferred directly between peers, but a dedicated server coordinates all operations and maintains meta-data. We achieve high reliability guarantees while keeping our data replication factor low by adopting sophisticated erasure coding technology (cf., [2]).