Towards Peer-to-Peer Based Service Hosting through Procurement Mechanism for Host Selection

Existing peer-to-peer systems focus on mono-type service provision, such as file sharing or file storage. If it is required to build more complex applications on peer-to-peer networks such as a virtual world application, they have to be extended to hosting diversified services. To achieve this, we propose a peer-to-peer platform on which peer computers can jointly host a file, a website, or a program. Users of our platform can utilize spare hardware resource on peer computers to host their own services. They pay the hosting cost to peers for hardware resources utilization. The problem is how to minimize hosting cost while maintain required service availability. This problem becomes difficult when peers are strategic. In this paper, we provide a procurement mechanism is provided to solve this problem by inducing peers reporting their true hosting cost and availability.