Recent technological and market forces have profoundly impacted the music industry. Emphasizing threats from peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the industry continues to seek sanctions against individuals who offer significant number of songs for others to copy. Yet there is little rigorous empirical analysis of the impacts of online sharing on the success of music products. Combining data on the...

The expected file download time of the random time-based switching algorithm for peer selection and file downloading in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network is still unknown. The main contribution of this paper is to analyze the expected file download time of the time-based switching algorithm for file sharing in P2P networks when the service capacity of a source peer is totally correlated over time, n...

The practice of illegally copying and distributing digital games is at the heart of one of the most heated and divisive debates in the international games environment, with stakeholders typically viewing it as a very positive (pirates) or very negative (the industry, policy makers). Despite the substantial interest in game piracy, there is very little objective information available about its m...

P2P systems for sharing content have become very popular over the last few years. However, despite the increasing attention of both the research community and large numbers of users, the actual behavior of these systems over prolonged periods of time is still poorly understood. This paper presents a detailed measurement study over a period of eight months of BitTorrent/Suprnova, a P2P file-shar...

Guaranteeing Performance through Fairness in Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing and Streaming Systems

In this paper, we present a survey of recent work in analytical modeling of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems. We focus on the modeling of three aspects of such systems. First, we describe several performance models regarding chunk-based protocols such as BitTorrent [1]. Secondly, we summarize a trace analysis and corresponding model of the workload and user behavior in a general file sha...

Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems commonly use the set-of-terms model – the union of the terms in the shared files – to describe succinctly a peer’s shared files. This information is shared with neighbors who use it to guide query routing decisions. The problem with this model, however, is that it falsely suggests term cooccurrences that do not exist in any single file. Consequently, queries ge...

One of the most important prerequisites for the success of a peer to peer system is the availability of participants willing to provide resources (files, computational cycles, time and effort to the community). Free riders may not do any harm in file-sharing peer to peer applications, like NAPSTER, because of the nature of electronic data. It can be reproduced at no cost; downloading a copy doe...

Decentralized search aims to find the target node in a large network by using only local information. The applications of it include peer-to-peer file sharing, web search and anything else that requires locating a specific target in a complex system. In this paper, we examine the degree-based decentralized search method. Specifically, we evaluate the efficiency of the method in different cases ...

The widespread adoption of P2P applications in environments beyond ordinary file sharing demands the fulfillment of several security requirements. Important steps have been taken towards security in P2P systems, with relevant mechanisms being proposed in the past to address specific vulnerabilities. However, existing approaches lack flexibility, since they do not (include enough mechanisms to) ...