2011/08/12 by Seth James Nielson, Nielson, Seth James, Caleb E. Spare +3
Computer Science · Psychology · #Caching and Content Delivery #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Gambling Behavior and Treatments #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #cs.GT #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1108.2716
14 pages, 11 figures, technical report
arxiv created 2011/08/12 · openalex publication_date 2011/08/12 · arxiv updated 2011/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
BitTorrent is a widely-deployed, peer-to-peer file transfer protocol engineered with a "tit for tat" mechanism that encourages cooperation. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for nodes to altruistically provide service to their peers after they finish downloading a file, and what altruism there is can be exploited by aggressive clients like Bit- Tyrant. This altruism, called seeding, is always beneficial and sometimes essential to BitTorrent's real-world performance. We propose a new long-term incentives mechanism in BitTorrent to encourage peers to seed and we evaluate its effectiveness via simulation. We show that when nodes running our algorithm reward one another for good behavior in previous swarms, they experience as much as a 50% improvement in download times over unrewarded nodes. Even when aggressive clients, such as BitTyrant, participate in the swarm, our rewarded nodes still outperform them, although by smaller margins.