EquiCast: Scalable Multicast with Selfish Users.

Authors: Idit Keidar, Roie Melamed and Ariel Orda.

In the 25th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '06), pages 63-71, July 2006.

Full version to appear in Computer Networks(COMNET) Special Issue on Gossiping in Distributed Systems, and Technical Report CCIT 573, Technion Department of Electrical Engineering, February 2006.

Abstract:

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks suffer from the problem of ``free-loaders", i.e., users who consume resources without contributing anything in return. In this paper, we tackle this problem taking a game theoretic perspective by modeling the system as a non-cooperative game. We introduce Equi-Cast, a wide-area P2P multicast protocol for large groups of selfish nodes. EquiCast is the first P2P multicast protocol that is formally proven to enforce cooperation in selfish environments. Additionally, we prove that EquiCast incurs a low constant load on each user.

Download:

Preprint of COMNET paper: pdf.
Preprint of PODC paper: ps, ps.gz, pdf, pdf.gz.
Technical Report CCIT 573, Technion Department of Electrical Engineering, July 2006: pdf.

Talk slides (powerpoint): ppt.