Protocols for sharing computing resources and dealing with nodes\u27 selfishness in peer-to-peer networks

Future P2P networks are likely to have no centralized administrative entity (owing to regulatory or scalability concerns) that control the nodes in the system. Therefore, it is important for network designers to take into account the independence and selfishness of P2P users to make the future systems more reliable and robust. Generally speaking, P2P network protocols need to be designed taking into account the fact that peers would behave selfishly to maximize their own interests or utility. The resources will generally be owned by different users or organizations that will not necessarily volunteer to make them freely available, even when they are not being used. To provide the incentives for large-scale resource sharing, resources need to be buyable and sellable, with the possibility of contracts that (at least in theory) can be enforced.;A set of protocols are needed that range from ones that are very light-weight for small micro-value transactions, to those that are more heavy-weight where enforceability (perhaps at a later time) is more important than efficiency. This will support the creation of a market economy of network-accessible resources, including those that are specifically part of the network such as link bandwidth, and node processing and memory capacities. These resources would be purchased on demand, in very short periods of time, and for very short (and larger when necessary) periods of time. Users will rely more on buying the power in the network, only when and for how long they need it, rather than on relying solely on what is locally available. This will be more economical and offer the user more potential power. Moreover, market economic principles have been very successful in human societies for resource allocation, and therefore, we expect to derive similar benefits from computational resource economies built on top of P2P systems as follows: To develop solutions for the above problems, we make the following contributions in this dissertation. (1) We provide a solution for enabling distributed computing by harnessing idle computing resources, such as CPU cycles, in P2P networks taking into account nodes\u27 selfishness. (2) We develop a mechanism for pricing and trading resources such as data and routing bandwidth in P2P networks. (3) To increase users confidence to participate in the system, we develop a protocol for giving complete participation anonymity to the users of a P2P system. We also propose a reputation management framework for allowing users to evaluate the trustworthiness of each other before trading services/resources among themselves. The framework also implements a light-weight currency infrastructure that allows use of monetary incentive schemes for promoting cooperation among selfish users. (4) We use game theory concepts to model and investigate the behavior of users in P2P systems. (Abstract shortened by UMI.