On the Topologies Formed by Selfish Peers

On the Topologies Formed by Selfish Peers

Abstract

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) systems often suffer from a large fraction of freeriders not contributing any resources to the network. Various mechanisms have been designed to overcome this problem. However, the selfish behavior of peers has aspects which go beyond resource sharing. This paper studies the effects on the topology of a P2P network if peers selfishly select the peers to connect to. In our model, a peer exploits locality properties in order to minimize the latency (or response times) of its lookup operations. At the same time, the peer aims at not having to maintain links to too many other peers in the system. By giving tight bounds on the price of anarchy, we show that the resulting topologies can be much worse than if peers collaborated. Moreover, the network may never stabilize, even in the absence of churn. Finally, we establish the complexity of Nash equilibria in our game theoretic model of P2P networks. Specifically, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether our game has a Nash equilibrium and can stabilize.

Grafik Top
Authors
  • Moscibroda, Thomas
  • Schmid, Stefan
  • Wattenhofer, Roger
Grafik Top
Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
25th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Informatik Allgemeines
Event Location
Denver, Colorado, USA
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
July 2006
Date
2006
Export
Grafik Top