C-Trust: A Trust Management System to Improve Fairness on Circular P2P Networks, Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications

An important issue in Peer-to-Peer networks is to encourage users to share with others as they use the resources of the network. However, some nodes may only consume from users without giving anything in return. To fix this problem, we can incorporate trust management systems with network infrastructures. Current trust managements are usually made for unstructured overlays and have several shortcomings. They are made to be very similar to e-commerce scoring websites which may not be the best design for fairness in P2P networks. Several problems may arise with their designs such as difficulties to provide a complete history of freeloaders or lack of an autonomous removal mechanism in case of severe attacks. In this paper, we argue that such systems can be deployed more efficiently by using a structured paradigm. For this purpose, we propose C-Trust, a trust management system which is focused on fairness for P2P networks. This is done by getting help from current circular structured designs. This method is able to mark freeloaders, identify their severity of abusion and punish them accordingly. We are also able to effectively protect both Seeder-to-Leecher and Leecher-to-Leecher transactions. This feature is specially important for fairness which other trust systems have not considered so far.