Optimization of non-cooperative P2P network from the game theory point of view

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, which overcomes the bottleneck of server bandwidth by allowing peers to share the downloaded data directly. However, the greedy and non-cooperative behavior (such as leeching) of individual peer can degrade the performance of P2P significantly. In this paper, we optimize the non-cooperative P2P network from the game theory point of view. Specifically, we investigate the scenarios of pure Nash equilibrium, mixed Nash equilibrium, correlated equilibrium, and pure cooperation. We study the users´ behaviors as a good peer (i.e., uploading data to others) or a bad peer (i.e., only downloading data). The results provide a guidance for the server with the presence of greedy peers. Analysis and simulation results show the network behaviors under the different scenarios, which can provide guidance to practical distributed design in large scale networks.