Mathematical modeling of incentive policies in P2P systems

Abstract

In order to stimulate cooperation among nodes in P2P systems, some form of incentive mechanism is necessary so as to encourage service contribution. Hence, designing and evaluating the stability, robustness and performance of incentive policies is extremely critical. In this paper, we propose a general mathematical framework to evaluate the stability and evolution of a family of shared history based incentive policies. To illustrate the utility of the framework, we present two incentive policies and show why one incentive policy can lead to a total system collapse while the other is stable and operates at the optimal point. One can use this mathematical framework to design and analyze various incentive policies and verify whether they match the design objectives of the underlying P2P systems.