Ranking Based System to Reduce Free Riding Behavior in P2P Systems

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) network is a distributed system in which the autonomous peers participate at their will and resources are shared in distributed manner. The massive increase in Internet has given wing to the P2P applications and the search protocols are gainfully utilized in the resource discovery process for Internet related applications. Today, the research community has found interest in the P2P networks. There are several challenges in designing an efficient protocol for the P2P networks. These networks suffer from various problems, such as free riding behaviors, whitewashing, poor search scalability, fake/malicious content distribution, lack of a robust trust model, etc. Moreover, the peers can join and leave the network (churn rate) at any time which makes trust management and searching files more challenging task. We have proposed a ranking based P2P system which collects the statics of data shared by the participating peers and defines the rank of peers. The ranking of a peer increases/decreases in ratio of the data uploaded/downloaded by the peer. The proposed system promotes the peers to share their resources in order to increase their rank and reduces free riding behaviors. We have analytically analyzed the performance of proposed system and observed that proposed system performs better than existing reputation based system.