Addressing the Non-Cooperation Problem in Competitive P2P Systems

Abstract

Large-scale competitive P2P systems are threatened by the non-cooperation problem, where peers do not forward queries to potential competitors. While non-cooperation is not a problem in current P2P free file-sharing systems, it is likely to be a problem in such P2P systems as pay-per-transaction file-sharing systems, P2P auctions, and P2P service discovery systems, where peers are in competition with each other to provide services. Here, we motivate why non-cooperation is likely to be a problem in these types of networks and present an economic protocol to address this problem. This protocol, called the RTR protocol, is based on the buying and selling of the right-to-respond (RTR) to each query in the system.