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On the topologies formed by selfish peers

Published: 23 July 2006 Publication History

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    PODC '06: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
    July 2006
    230 pages
    ISBN:1595933840
    DOI:10.1145/1146381
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 July 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. NP-hardness
    2. game theory
    3. network creation

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    • (2019)Geometric Network Creation GamesThe 31st ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures10.1145/3323165.3323199(323-332)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2019
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