A mechanism for resource pricing and fairness in peer-to-peer networks

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, each peer acts as the role of client and server. As a client, each peer is regarded as a service customer. It sends requests to other peers to download files and obtains resource allocation from them. As a server, each peer is thought as a service provider. It receives service requests from other peers and allocates its resources to them. To encourage cooperation between peers, fairness is very important in P2P networks since it fosters an incentive to the peers to offer resources to the network. We formulate a fair resource allocation model for P2P networks and investigate the utility optimization problem by Lagrangian method. In order to realize the optimal resource allocation, we present a novel price-based resource allocation scheme by applying the first order Lagrangian method and low-pass filtering scheme, so that a service provider can allocate its resources to its customers based on offered prices, achieving the efficient and fair allocation of the available resources to the serviced customers. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can achieve the optimum within reasonable convergence times.