Utility maximization for bandwidth allocation in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been commonly applied into many applications such as distributed storage, cloud computing and social networking. In P2P networks fairness fosters an incentive so as to encourage peers to offer resources (e.g, upload bandwidth) to the networks. In this paper, we consider fair bandwidth allocation of access links in P2P file-sharing networks and develop a coupled network-wide utility maximization model which aims at achieving several kinds of fairness among requesting peers. We provide a meaningful interpretation of the problem of maximizing social welfare and its sub-problems from an economic point of view. The coupled optimization problem is difficult to resolve in a distributed way because of its non-strict convexity and non-separation. We apply a modified successive approximation method to investigate the coupled problem and propose a distributed bandwidth allocation scheme to solve the approximation problems. Then, we investigate the convergence of the scheme by mathematical analysis and evaluate the performance through numerical examples, which validate that the scheme can achieve the global optimum within reasonable iterations.