Simplified Biased Contribution Index (SBCI): A Mechanism to Make P2P Network Fair and Efficient for Resource Sharing

To balance the load and to discourage the free-riding in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, many incentive mechanisms and policies have been proposed in recent years. Global peer ranking is one such mechanism. In this mechanism, peers are ranked based on a metric called contribution index. Contribution index is defined in such a manner that peers are motivated to share the resources in the network. Fairness in the terms of upload to download ratio in each peer can be achieved by this method. However, calculation of contribution index is not trivial. It is computed distributively and iteratively in the entire network and requires strict clock synchronization among the peers. A very small error in clock synchronization may lead to wrong results. Furthermore, iterative calculation requires a lot of message overhead and storage capacity, which makes its implementation more complex. In this paper, we are proposing a simple incentive mechanism based on the contributions of peers, which can balance the upload and download amount of resources in each peer. It does not require iterative calculation, therefore, can be implemented with lesser message overhead and storage capacity without requiring strict clock synchronization. This approach is efficient as there are very less rejections among the cooperative peers. It can be implemented in a truly distributed fashion with O(N) time complexity per peer.