Trust-based taxonomy for free riders in distributed multimedia systems

The ever growing explosion in technological advancements is paving the way to the expansion of multimedia applications. To fully utilize such applications, some issues related to decentralization must be addressed. In this paper, we focus on the problem of free riding in decentralized collaborative environments. We propose a novel taxonomy of free riders in multimedia systems based on trustworthiness. We believe that trustworthiness is a vital dimension that should be considered when identifying free riders. We also propose a new mechanism to filter out and isolate free riders. Our extensive simulation experiments show that our proposed algorithm is reasonably successful in identifying free riders in multimedia-based systems.