Design space analysis for modeling incentives in distributed systems

Rameez Rahman, Tamás Vinkó, David Hales, Johan Pouwelse, Henk Sips
2011 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference on SIGCOMM - SIGCOMM '11  
Distributed systems without a central authority, such as peer-topeer (P2P) systems, employ incentives to encourage nodes to follow the prescribed protocol. Game-theoretic analysis is often used to evaluate incentives in such systems. However, most gametheoretic analyses of distributed systems do not adequately model the repeated interactions of nodes inherent in such systems. We present a game-theoretic analysis of a popular P2P protocol, Bit-Torrent, that models the repeated interactions in
more » ... h protocols. We also note that an analytical approach for modeling incentives is often infeasible given the complicated nature of most deployed protocols. In order to comprehensively model incentives in complex protocols, we propose a simulation-based method, which we call Design Space Analysis (DSA). DSA provides a tractable analysis of competing protocol variants within a detailed design space. We apply DSA to P2P file swarming systems. With extensive simulations we analyze a wide-range of protocol variants and gain insights into their robustness and performance. To validate these results and to demonstrate the efficacy of DSA, we modify an instrumented BitTorrent client and evaluate protocols discovered using DSA. We show that they yield higher system performance and robustness relative to the reference implementation.
doi:10.1145/2018436.2018458 dblp:conf/sigcomm/RahmanVHPS11 fatcat:sgpnfpxpfnbxnovrqhw2d2csce