An Experimental Study on Cheating and Anti-Cheating in Gossip-Based Protocol

The Internet has witnessed a rapid growth in deployment of gossip-based protocol in many multicast applications. In a typical gossip-based protocol, each node independently exchanges data with its neighbors, acting as dual roles of receiver and sender to facilitate scalability and resilience. However, most of previous work in this literature seldom considered cheating issue of end users, which is also very important in face of the fact that the mutual cooperation inherently determines overall system performance. In this paper, we mainly investigate the dishonest behaviors in decentralized gossip-based protocol through extensive experimental study. Our original contributions come in two-fold: In the first part of cheating study, we analytically discuss two typical cheating strategies, that is, intentionally increasing subscription requests and untruthfully calculating forwarding probability, and further evaluate their negative impacts. The results indicate that more attention should be paid on defending cheating behaviors in gossip-based protocol. In the second part of anti-cheating study, we propose a simple receiver-driven measurement mechanism, which evaluates individual forwarding traffic from the perspective of receivers and thus identifies cheating nodes with high incoming/outgoing ratio. The experiments under various conditions show that it performs quite well in case of serious cheating and achieves considerable performance in other cases.