Bittorrent is an auction: analyzing and improving bittorrent's incentives Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:3509250, abstract = {Incentives play a crucial role in BitTorrent, motivating users to upload to others to achieve fast download times for all peers. Though long believed to be robust to strategic manipulation, recent work has empirically shown that BitTorrent does not provide its users incentive to follow the protocol. We propose an auction-based model to study and improve upon BitTorrent's incentives. The insight behind our model is that BitTorrent uses, not tit-for-tat as widely believed, but an auction to decide which peers to serve. Our model not only captures known, performance-improving strategies, it shapes our thinking toward new, effective strategies. For example, our analysis demonstrates, counter-intuitively, that BitTorrent peers have incentive to intelligently under-report what pieces of the file they have to their neighbors. We implement and evaluate a modification to BitTorrent in which peers reward one another with proportional shares of bandwidth. Within our game-theoretic model, we prove that a proportional-share client is strategy-proof. With experiments on PlanetLab, a local cluster, and live downloads, we show that a proportional-share unchoker yields faster downloads against BitTorrent and BitTyrant clients, and that under-reporting pieces yields prolonged neighbor interest.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Levin, Dave and Lacurts, Katrina and Spring, Neil and Bhattacharjee, Bobby}, booktitle = {SIGCOMM '08: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication}, citeulike-article-id = {3509250}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1402958.1402987}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1402958.1402987}, doi = {10.1145/1402958.1402987}, isbn = {978-1-60558-175-0}, keywords = {bittorrent, game, incentives, project, theory}, location = {Seattle, WA, USA}, pages = {243--254}, posted-at = {2008-11-13 16:32:24}, priority = {0}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Bittorrent is an auction: analyzing and improving bittorrent's incentives}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1402958.1402987}, year = {2008} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:3509250 L3 - citeulike-article-id:3509250 N2 - Incentives play a crucial role in BitTorrent, motivating users to upload to others to achieve fast download times for all peers. Though long believed to be robust to strategic manipulation, recent work has empirically shown that BitTorrent does not provide its users incentive to follow the protocol. We propose an auction-based model to study and improve upon BitTorrent's incentives. The insight behind our model is that BitTorrent uses, not tit-for-tat as widely believed, but an auction to decide which peers to serve. Our model not only captures known, performance-improving strategies, it shapes our thinking toward new, effective strategies. For example, our analysis demonstrates, counter-intuitively, that BitTorrent peers have incentive to intelligently under-report what pieces of the file they have to their neighbors. We implement and evaluate a modification to BitTorrent in which peers reward one another with proportional shares of bandwidth. Within our game-theoretic model, we prove that a proportional-share client is strategy-proof. With experiments on PlanetLab, a local cluster, and live downloads, we show that a proportional-share unchoker yields faster downloads against BitTorrent and BitTyrant clients, and that under-reporting pieces yields prolonged neighbor interest. CY - Seattle, WA, USA SN - 978-1-60558-175-0 AD - New York, NY, USA EP - 254 TI - Bittorrent is an auction: analyzing and improving bittorrent's incentives PB - ACM T2 - SIGCOMM '08: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication SP - 243 KW - bittorrent KW - game KW - incentives KW - project KW - theory AU - Levin, Dave AU - Lacurts, Katrina AU - Spring, Neil AU - Bhattacharjee, Bobby PY - 2008/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1402958.1402987 ER -