Improving content availability by request-adaptive incentive in private peer-to-peer communities

Recently, BitTorrent (BT) communities are rapidly evolving towards Private Torrent (PT) sites. The efficiency of such content sharing system depends on how well it can satisfy the requirements of users. The traditional way to improve usability is to make users extend their seeding duration by incentives like Share Ratio Enforcement (SRE). However, our measurement-based studies show its inefficiency in meeting various download requests from users. For example, some available contents have not been requested for long and some requests are not available, recognized as the “available but no request” and “request but not available” problems respectively. To make the content availability match users' download demands, we propose new incentive polices that only reward the seeding behaviors for needed torrents. This is achieved by providing users the rewarding information of seeding various contents that vary based on their interests and timeliness to the community. Our trace-driven simulation result shows the proposed “Max Cost Interval” and “Max Time Interval” policies can significantly improve the content over existing policies in a more cost-efficient way.