Energy Adaptive Mechanism for P2P File Sharing Protocols

Peer to peer (P2P) file sharing applications have gained considerable popularity and are quite bandwidth and energy intensive. With the increased usage of P2P applications on mobile devices, its battery life has become of significant concern. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for energy adaptation in P2P file sharing protocols to significantly enhance the possibility of a client completing the file download before exhausting its battery. The underlying idea is to group mobile clients based on their energy budget and impose restrictions on bandwidth usage and hence on energy consumption. This allows us to provide favoured treatment to low energy devices, while still ensuring long-term fairness through a credit based mechanism and preventing free riding. Furthermore, we show how the proposed mechanism can be implemented in a popular P2P file sharing application, the BitTorrent protocol and analyze it through a comprehensive set of simulations.