Building Better Incentives for Robustness in BitTorrent

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new incentive mechanism for BitTorrent that rewards good behavior, significantly improving download times and robustness against aggressive clients like BitTyrant through simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a long-term incentive mechanism for BitTorrent that encourages seeding and demonstrates its effectiveness via simulation.

Findings

Up to 50% faster download times with the new incentives.

Rewarded nodes outperform aggressive clients like BitTyrant.

Incentive mechanism enhances robustness and performance in BitTorrent.

Abstract

BitTorrent is a widely-deployed, peer-to-peer file transfer protocol engineered with a "tit for tat" mechanism that encourages cooperation. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for nodes to altruistically provide service to their peers after they finish downloading a file, and what altruism there is can be exploited by aggressive clients like Bit- Tyrant. This altruism, called seeding, is always beneficial and sometimes essential to BitTorrent's real-world performance. We propose a new long-term incentives mechanism in BitTorrent to encourage peers to seed and we evaluate its effectiveness via simulation. We show that when nodes running our algorithm reward one another for good behavior in previous swarms, they experience as much as a 50% improvement in download times over unrewarded nodes. Even when aggressive clients, such as BitTyrant, participate in the swarm, our rewarded nodes still outperform them, although by smaller margins.