Method for providing reliable peer activity report for managed P2P communications

Abstract

In P2P-based contents distribution, an overlay network is constructed by peers that reside in user domain not service provider domain, and each peer shares data with each other. Due to the unmanageability characteristics of P2P networking, it tends to lead to inefficiency due to ignorance of underlying network in spite of its advantages and unfairness caused by absence of incentives to contributing peers. In order to solve several issues regarding P2P networking and making use of its advantages compared to existing server-client model, ITU-T Q.9/11 is developing a series of MP2P (Managed P2P communications) standards. In order to figure out the status of overlay network and gathering activities information of peers, it aggregates the information from peers that may not be trusted due to the possibility of forgery. It is important to assure the integrity and non-forgery of reports from peers. In this paper, we propose a method for gathering reliable peer activity report by use of digital signatures.