Designing Incentives for Peer-to-Peer Routing ( Technical Report )

In a peer-to-peer network, each node is typically required to route packets on behalf of other nodes. We study the problem of designing incentives to ensure that nodes carry out this responsibility. We model the interactions between nodes as a “random matching game,” and describe a simple reputation system that can provide incentives for good behavior. Using simulations, we investigate the robustness of this scheme in the presence of noise and malicious nodes, and we attempt to quantify some of the design trade-offs.