Improving Accuracy and Coverage in an Internet-Deployed Reputation Mechanism

P2P systems can benefit from reputation mechanisms to promote cooperation and help peers to identify good service providers. However, in spite of a large number of proposed reputation mechanisms, few have been investigated in real situations. BarterCast is a distributed reputation mechanism used by our Internet-deployed Bittorent-based file-sharing client Tribler. In BarterCast, each peer uses messages received from other peers to build a weighted, directed subjective graph that represents the upload and download activity in the system. A peer calculates the reputations of other peers by applying the maxflow algorithm to its subjective graph. For efficiency reasons, only paths of at most two hops are considered in this calculation. In this paper, we identify and assess three potential modifications to BarterCast for improving its accuracy and coverage (fraction of peers for which a reputation value can be computed). First, a peer executes maxflow from the perspective of the node with the highest betweenness centrality in its subjective graph instead of itself. Second, we assume a gossiping protocol that gives each peer complete information about upload and download activities in the system, and third, we lift the path length restriction in the maxflow algorithm. To assess these modifications, we crawl the Tribler network and collect the upload and download actions of the peers for three months. We apply BarterCast with and without the modifications on the collected data and measure accuracy and coverage.