BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a Credit Squeeze in BitTorrent?

Hales, David; Rahman, Rameez; Zhang, Boxun; Meulpolder, M.; Pouwelse, Johan

doi:10.1109/wetice.2009.22

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Although apparently the abundant supply of bandwidth leads to high downloading speed, in this paper we argue that oversupply also has some negative effects such as excessively long seeding times that are often unproductive. Previous work has dealt with analyzing the pros and cons of SRE schemes from a macroeconomic perspective [12], [19]. Our analysis considerably expands these works.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…However, our paper shows that providing limited bandwidth is not the will of users, but it is a consequence of the oversupply in private communities. While these studies all focus on demonstrating the high seeding level achieved by private communities, Authors in [12] study it from a macroeconomic point of view and show that such communities can suffer from problems leading to serious inefficiencies. Authors in [19] further study these problems in private communities, and they provide a novel mechanism that proactively prevents the system from seizing.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fast download but eternal seeding: The reward and punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement

Jia

Rahman

Vinkó

et al. 2011

2011 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing

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Abstract-Many private BitTorrent communities employ Sharing Ratio Enforcement (SRE) schemes to incentivize users to contribute their upload resources. It has been demonstrated that communities that use SRE are greatly oversupplied, i.e., they have much higher seeder-to-leecher ratios than communities in which SRE is not employed. The first order effect of oversupply under SRE is a positive increase in the average downloading speed. However, users are forced to seed for extremely long times to maintain adequate sharing ratios to be able to start new downloads. In this paper, we propose a fluid model to study the effects of oversupply under SRE, which predicts the average downloading speed, the average seeding time, and the average upload capacity utilization for users in communities that employ SRE. We notice that the phenomenon of oversupply has two undesired negative effects: a) Peers are forced to seed for long times, even though their seeding efforts are often not very productive (in terms of low upload capacity utilization); and b) SRE discriminates against peers with low bandwidth capacities and forces them to seed for longer durations than peers with high capacities. To alleviate these problems, we propose four different strategies for SRE, which have been inspired by ideas in social sciences and economics. We evaluate these strategies through simulations. Our results indicate that these new strategies release users from needlessly long seeding durations, while also being fair towards peers with low capacities and maintaining high systemwide downloading speeds.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast download but eternal seeding: The reward and punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement

Jia

Rahman

Vinkó

et al. 2011

2011 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing

Self Cite

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“…This appears to be counter-intuitive. However, it can be explained by the fact that rewarding peers according to effort results in an injection of new credits in the system and as we showed in [7], injecting new credits in the system leads to a more efficient system. This is due to the fact that because of extra credit, slow peers are not 'strapped for cash' so to speak, simply because they are slow, and thus are able to download more files, increasing overall system performance.…”

Section: B Efficiency and Fairness In Credit Based Enforcement Schemesmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…In order to test our hypothesis, we performed experiments using a simplified model of a credit based sharing ratio enforcement scheme. This model is similar to the one described in our previous work [7]. In this model, the community is represented by a set of peers (P).…”

Section: B Efficiency and Fairness In Credit Based Enforcement Schemesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Efficiency and Fairness in P2P Systems with Effort-Based Incentives

Rahman

Meulpolder

Hales

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications

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Abstract-Most P2P systems that have some kind of incentive mechanism reward peers according to their contribution, i.e. total bandwidth offered to the system. Due to the disparity in bandwidth capacity between P2P users on the Internet, the common effect of such mechanisms is that the fastest peers reap the highest benefits. We take a different approach and study how to incentivize cooperation in P2P systems based on effort, i.e. contribution relative to capacity. We make the following contributions: 1) we argue that contribution-based incentive schemes in P2P systems unnecessarily disfavor slow peers and decrease overall system performance; 2) we advocate the use of principles from an alternative economic vision, Participatory Economics (Parecon), to inspire systems to be fair and to ensure maximization of the social welfare while being efficient at the same time, and 3) we present the results of simulations in which we apply principles from Parecon to two popular real life systems: a) the popular file sharing BitTorrent protocol; b) a generic credit based sharing ratio enforcement scheme. Our approach yields a higher system performance and fairness and offers new insights into P2P incentive design.

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“…If a peer uploads more than it downloads means the peer should have more credit. But Tribler team discovered that PTs possibly exist "credit squeeze" phenomenon which means the lacking of credit incurs significantly reducing of system efficiency [9]. These investigations revealed some characteristics of PTs and provided primitive research results to SRE mechanism.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Sustainability of Private P2P Communities

Chen

Chu

2011

2011 Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)

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Abstract-Private P2P communities, as known as "BitTorrent Darknets" or "Private Trackers (PTs)", have received much attention in the research community recently. The downloading performance in PTs with high Seeder-to-Leecher Ratio (SLR) is much better than in public P2P communities because PTs deploy auxiliary Share Ratio Enhancement (SRE) mechanism. Nevertheless, though high SLR can benefit leechers, it will result in "Poor Downloading Motivation" problem to members who want to increase their share ratio in order to safely survive. This problem may discourage PT members' activity. To improve sustainability of PTs, we adopt Predator-Prey model in ecology to analysis high SLR phenomenon, study the optimal stable SLR range to PTs and solve the above problem. Experiments verify our model and provide insight to study PTs.

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BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a Credit Squeeze in BitTorrent?

Cited by 24 publications

References 9 publications

Fast download but eternal seeding: The reward and punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement

Fast download but eternal seeding: The reward and punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement

Improving Efficiency and Fairness in P2P Systems with Effort-Based Incentives

Improving Sustainability of Private P2P Communities

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