Discourage free riding in Peer-to-Peer file sharing systems with file migration and workload balancing approach

Abstract

Free riding is a great challenge to the development and maintenance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. A file migration and workload balancing based approach (FMWBBA) to discourage free riding is proposed in this paper. The heart of our mechanism is to migrate some shared files from the overloaded peers to the neighboring free riders automatically and transparently, which enforces free riders to offer services when altruistic peers are heavily overloaded. File migration is a key issue in our approach, and some related strategies are discussed. A simulation is designed to verify this approach, and the results show that it can not only alleviate free riding, but also improve the Quality of Service (QoS) and robustness of P2P networks efficiently.