On the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Systems for Large-volume Contents

摘要

Peer-to-Peer technology has changed the landscape of content sharing in the recent years. Among various content distribution systems, the key features of Bit-Torrent make it conducive to distribute files with large volume, such as multimedia contents or scientific data. In this paper, we propose two major improvements on BitTorrent so that the social welfare in the peer-to-peer network is maximized. We present the peer grouping problem and provide an integer programming solution to the problem. The peers' individual behavior is also being studied, and we will present a cost-based incentive provisioning contribution mechanism to encourage sharing.