Coalitions and incentives for content distribution over a secure peer-to-peer middleware

Abstract — Nowadays, Peer-to-Peer is responsible for more than 60 % of Internet traffic. These protocols have proved to save bandwidth and computing resources in content distribution system. But, problems related to user behaviour, such as free riding, still persist, and users must be motivated to share content. In previous work, we have designed and simulated a coalition and incentive theoretical mechanism for content distribution that aims to fight against problems in user behaviour. In this pa-per, we present a real implementation of it. Since devel-oping a peer-to-peer application from scratch is a labori-ous and error prone task, we use SMEPP, a middleware that aims to ease the development of secure distributed application, to implement it. Keywords-coalitions; incentives; peer-to-peer; middleware; overlay. I