Biblio

Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to rely on the resources of their own users. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Early P2P networks did not use proper mechanisms to manage fairness. However, after seeing difficulties and rise of freeloaders in networks like Gnutella, the importance of providing fairness for users have become apparent. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based security model which leads to a network infrastructure that lightens the work of Seeders and makes Leechers to contribute more. This method is able to prevent betrayals in Leecher-to-Leecher transactions and helps Seeders to be treated more fairly. This is what other incentive methods such as Bittorrent are incapable of doing. Additionally, by getting help from cryptography and combining it with our method, it is also possible to achieve secure channels, immune to spying, next to a fair network. This is the first protocol designed for P2P networks which has separated Leechers and Seeders without the need to a central server. The simulation results clearly show how our proposed approach can overcome free-riding issue. In addition, our findings revealed that our approach is able to provide an appropriate level of fairness for the users and can decrease the download time.

Among the various challenges faced by the P2P file sharing systems like BitTorrent, the most common attack on the basic foundation of such systems is: Free-riding. Generally, free-riders are the users in the file sharing network who avoid contributing any resources but tend to consume the resources unethically from the P2P network whereas white-washers are more specific category of free-riders that voluntarily leave the system in a frequent fashion and appearing again and again with different identities to escape from the penal actions imposed by the network. BitTorrent being a collaborative distributed platform requires techniques for discouraging and punishing such user behavior. In this paper, we propose that ``Instead of punishing, we may focus more on rewarding the honest peers''. This approach could be presented as an alternative to other mechanisms of rewarding the peers like tit-for-tat [10], reciprocity based etc., built for the BitTorrent platform. The prime objective of BitTrusty is: providing incentives to the cooperative peers by rewarding in terms of cryptocoins based on blockchain. We have anticipated three ways of achieving the above defined objective. We are further investigating on how to integrate these two technologies of distributed systems viz. P2P file sharing systems and blockchain, and with this new paradigm, interesting research areas can be further developed, both in the field of P2P cryptocurrency networks and also when these networks are combined with other distributed scenarios.