FairTorrent: bringing fairness to peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-Peer file-sharing applications suffer from a fundamental problem of unfairness. Free-riders cause slower download times for others by contributing little or no upload bandwidth while consuming much download bandwidth. Previous attempts to address this fair bandwidth allocation problem suffer from slow peer discovery, inaccurate predictions of neighboring peers' bandwidth allocations, underutilization of bandwidth, and complex parameter tuning. We present FairTorrent, a new deficit-based distributed algorithm that accurately rewards peers in accordance with their contribution. A FairTorrent peer simply uploads the next data block to a peer to whom it owes the most data as measured by a deficit counter. FairTorrent is resilient to exploitation by free-riders and strategic peers, is simple to implement, requires no bandwidth over-allocation, no prediction of peers' rates, no centralized control, and no parameter tuning. We implemented FairTorrent in a BitTorrent client ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Alex Sherman, Jason Nieh, Clifford Stein
• Keywords: Bandwidth Allocation Problem, Bandwidth Allocations, Bittorrent Clients, Computer Networks, CONEXT 2009