Trust-based incentive mechanism to motivate cooperation in hybrid P2P networks

In this paper, a novel Super-peer based Trust model (SuperTrust) is presented to incent peers to cooperate in a hybrid Peer-to-Peer (P2P) system. It is not unusual in a P2P system that peers have different interests when it comes to file sharing. Repeated transactions are less likely to occur if peers share little interests. And without sufficient number of transactions among peers, it is difficult to build trust relationships. In SuperTrust, peers are divided into groups based on their sharing interests. Trust relations between different types of peers are carefully studied and a filtering algorithm is then proposed by examining the similarities of peers’ feedbacks such that fake, misleading and unfair referrals can be eliminated from the trust calculation. Extensive study has been done to compare the performance of SuperTrust against several existing approaches, such as PDTrust and RBTrust. Analyses and results demonstrate that the search failure rate of proposed model is very low and demands little system resources. In addition, SuperTrust, by its design, is robust and resistant to several popular P2P attacks.