Nash equilibria in bandwidth allocation for non-cooperative peer-to-peer networks

In peer-to-peer networks, peers act as clients and servers, i.e., they can download files from others and allow others to download from them, at the same time. Since the bandwidth of a peer acting as server is shared among all its clients, the download rate experienced by a peer depends on the server choices of the other peers.We focus our investigation on the bandwidth allocation among the peers and model this system with non-cooperative game theory. We assume that peers are rational players that maximize their utility, corresponding to minimize their download time. We study the existence of Nash equilibrium points under a very simple server selection policy and show that it is efficiency from the point of view of the bandwidth utilization.