Fairness in Peer-to-Peer Networks

The first Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks were based mainly on the altruistic behaviour of its peers. Although newer implementations incorporate some kind of incentive mechanism to award sharing peers, no P2P network assures some quality of service. Our work is meant as a first step towards the development of P2P networks with quality of service. We propose a distributed resource allocation algorithm where peers control the service rate to its neighbours. This algorithm is based on the congestion pricing principle known from IP networks and ensures some form of fairness. Hence a peer gets a fair share of the resources available in the P2P network weighted by its contribution to the network. We present the first simulation results about the convergence of our algorithm and its functionality in large and varying networks.