%0 Journal Article %J Proc. INFOCOM %D 2005 %T Designing Incentives for Peer-to-Peer Routing %A Alberto Blanc %A Yi-Kai Liu %A Amin Vahda %X In a peer-to-peer network, nodes are typically required to route packets for each other. This leads to a problem of “free-loaders,” nodes that use the network but refuse to route other nodes’ packets. In this paper we study ways of designing incentives to discourage free-loading. We model the interactions between nodes as a “random matching game,” and describe a simple reputation system that provides incentives for good behavior. Under certain assumptions, we obtain a stable subgame-perfect equilibrium. We use simulations to investigate the robustness of this scheme in the presence of noise and malicious nodes, and we examine some of the design trade-offs. We also evaluate some possible adversarial strategies, and discuss how our results might apply to real peer-to-peer systems. %B Proc. INFOCOM %P 374-385 %8 2005/03/13 %G eng %U http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/infocom05.pdf