Controlling Free Riding Using Extended Point Based Incentive Mechanism in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Over the years of the emergence of peer-to-peer systems a phenomenon named 'Free Riding' has affected its performance and become a serious threat to be resolved. Free riding phenomenon was first felt in the study of Gnutella. As the number of free riders increases, the performance of the overall system decreases as free riders use resources without giving anything to the system. To solve the problem of free riding we have developed an Extended Point Based Incentive Mechanism (EPBIM) through which the users are given some incentives to share some files into the system. Our scheme attracts the users to share more and more as it gives more points to the users which provide responses for some queries of other users in the system. This scheme is different from other incentive based schemes in the way that it uses some new parameters for incentives like the time user spends in the network, upload speed of the user, how many simultaneous uploads a user is providing, how many query responses a user is giving and query forwarding of other users in the network. Our simulation results show that this scheme reduces the percentage of free riders to a great extent therefore increasing the performance of a peer-to-peer network.