Providing Incentive and Service Differentiation in P2P Networks

Speaker:	Prof. John C.S. Lui
		Department of Computer Science & Engineering
		The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title :  	"Providing Incentive and Service Differentiation in P2P
		 Networks"

Date:		Monday, 8 November 2004

Time:		4:00 - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Traditional Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks do not provide service
differentiation and incentive for users. Consequently, users can easily
access information without contributing any information or service to a
P2P community. This leads to the "free-riding" problem and consequently,
most of the information requests are directed toward a small number of P2P
nodes which are willing to share information or to provide service, hence,
the "tragedy of the commons" occurs. The aim of this work is to provide
service differentiation and incentive features to P2P networks so as to
encourage all nodes to share information or services.

We first introduce a distributed resource distribution mechanism which has
a linear time complexity and it guarantees the "Pareto-optimal" resource
allocation. Secondly, we model the whole resource request and distribution
process as a competition game between all competing nodes. We show that
this game has a Nash equilibrium. To realize this game, we propose a
protocol such that all competing nodes can interact with the information
providing node such that Nash equilibra can be reached efficiently and
dynamically. Lastly, we show that our protocol is adaptive to different
nodes arrival and departure events, as well as to different forms of
network congestion.



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Biography:

John received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. After his
graduation, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory/San Jose
Laboratory.  He later joined the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at the CUHK.  He has been a visiting professor in computer
science departments at UCLA, Columbia University, University of Maryland
at College Park, Purdue University, University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. His current research interests are in theoretic/applied topics in
data networks, distributed multimedia systems, network security,
mathematical optimization and performance evaluation theory. John received
the CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award in 2001. He is an
associate editor in the Performance Evaluation Journal and an elected
member in the IFIP WG 7.3. John is the TPC co-chair of ACM Sigmetrics
2005. His personal interests include films and general reading.