Systems-compatible Incentives

Originally, the Internet was a technological playground, a collaborative endeavor among researchers who shared the common goal of achieving communication. Self-interest used not to be a concern, but the motivations of the Internet's participants have broadened. Today, the Internet consists of millions of commercial entities and nearly 2 billion users, who often have conflicting goals. For example, while Facebook gives users the illusion of access control, users do not have the ability to control how the personal data they upload is shared or sold by Facebook. Even in BitTorrent, where all users seemingly have the same motivation of downloading a file as quickly as possible, users can subvert the protocol to download more quickly without giving their fair share. These examples demonstrate that protocols that are merely technologically proficient are not enough. Successful networked systems must account for potentially competing interests. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how to build systems that give users incentives to follow the systems' protocols. To achieve incentive-compatible systems, I apply mechanisms from game theory and auction theory to protocol design. This approach has been considered in prior literature, but unfortunately has resulted in few real, deployed systems with incentives to cooperate. I identify the primary challenge in applying mechanism design and game theory to large-scale systems: the goals and assumptions of economic mechanisms often do not match those of networked systems. For example, while auction theory may assume a centralized clearing house, there is no analog in a decentralized system seeking to avoid single points of failure or centralized policies. Similarly, game theory often assumes that each player is able to observe everyone else's actions, or at the very least know how many other players there are, but maintaining perfect system-wide information is impossible in most systems. In other words, not all incentive mechanisms are systems-compatible. The main contribution of this dissertation is the design, implementation, and evaluation of various systems-compatible incentive mechanisms and their application to a wide range of deployable systems. These systems include BitTorrent, which is used to distribute a large file to a large number of downloaders, PeerWise, which leverages user cooperation to achieve lower latencies in Internet routing, and Hoodnets, a new system I present that allows users to share their cellular data access to obtain greater bandwidth on their mobile devices. Each of these systems represents a different point in the design space of systems-compatible incentives. Taken together, along with their implementations and evaluations, these systems demonstrate that systems-compatibility is crucial in achieving practical incentives in real systems. I present design principles outlining how to achieve systems-compatible incentives, which may serve an even broader range of systems than considered herein. I conclude this dissertation with what I consider to be the most important open problems in aligning the competing interests of the Internet's participants

Dealing With Misbehavior In Distributed Systems: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Most distributed systems comprise autonomous entities interacting with each other to achieve their objectives. These entities behave selfishly when making decisions. This behavior may result in strategical manipulation of the protocols thus jeopardizing the system wide goals. Micro-economics and game theory provides suitable tools to model such interactions. We use game theory to model and study three specific problems in distributed systems. We study the problem of sharing the cost of multicast transmissions and develop mechanisms to prevent cheating in such settings. We study the problem of antisocial behavior in a scheduling mechanism based on the second price sealed bid auction. We also build models using extensive form games to analyze the interactions of the attackers and the defender in a security game involving honeypots. Multicast cost sharing is an important problem and very few distributed strategyproof mechanisms exist to calculate the costs shares of the users. These mechanisms are susceptible to manipulation by rational nodes. We propose a faithful mechanism which uses digital signatures and auditing to catch and punish the cheating nodes. Such mechanism will incur some overhead. We deployed the proposed and existing mechanisms on planet-lab to experimentally analyze the overhead and other relevant economic properties of the proposed and existing mechanisms. In a second price sealed bid auction, even though the bids are sealed, an agent can infer the private values of the winning bidders, if the auction is repeated for related items. We study this problem from the perspective of a scheduling mechanism and develop an antisocial strategy which can be used by an agent to inflict losses on the other agents. In a security system attackers and defender(s) interact with each other. Examples of such systems are the honeynets which are used to map the activities of the attackers to gain valuable insight about their behavior. The attackers want to evade the honeypots while the defenders want them to attack the honeypots. These interesting interactions form the basis of our research where we develop a model used to analyze the interactions of an attacker and a honeynet system

Incentive-driven QoS in peer-to-peer overlays

A well known problem in peer-to-peer overlays is that no single entity has control over the software, hardware and configuration of peers. Thus, each peer can selfishly adapt its behaviour to maximise its benefit from the overlay. This thesis is concerned with the modelling and design of incentive mechanisms for QoS-overlays: resource allocation protocols that provide strategic peers with participation incentives, while at the same time optimising the performance of the peer-to-peer distribution overlay. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we present PledgeRoute, a novel contribution accounting system that can be used, along with a set of reciprocity policies, as an incentive mechanism to encourage peers to contribute resources even when users are not actively consuming overlay services. This mechanism uses a decentralised credit network, is resilient to sybil attacks, and allows peers to achieve time and space deferred contribution reciprocity. Then, we present a novel, QoS-aware resource allocation model based on Vickrey auctions that uses PledgeRoute as a substrate. It acts as an incentive mechanism by providing efficient overlay construction, while at the same time allocating increasing service quality to those peers that contribute more to the network. The model is then applied to lagsensitive chunk swarming, and some of its properties are explored for different peer delay distributions. When considering QoS overlays deployed over the best-effort Internet, the quality received by a client cannot be adjudicated completely to either its serving peer or the intervening network between them. By drawing parallels between this situation and well-known hidden action situations in microeconomics, we propose a novel scheme to ensure adherence to advertised QoS levels. We then apply it to delay-sensitive chunk distribution overlays and present the optimal contract payments required, along with a method for QoS contract enforcement through reciprocative strategies. We also present a probabilistic model for application-layer delay as a function of the prevailing network conditions. Finally, we address the incentives of managed overlays, and the prediction of their behaviour. We propose two novel models of multihoming managed overlay incentives in which overlays can freely allocate their traffic flows between different ISPs. One is obtained by optimising an overlay utility function with desired properties, while the other is designed for data-driven least-squares fitting of the cross elasticity of demand. This last model is then used to solve for ISP profit maximisation

Applying the repeated game framework to multiparty networked applications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-154).This thesis presents repeated game analysis as an important and practical tool for networked application and protocol designers. Incentives are a potential concern for a large number of networked applications. Well-studied examples include routing and peer-to-peer networks. To the extent that incentives significantly impact the outcome of a system, system designers require tools and frameworks to better understand how their design decisions impact these incentive concerns. Repetition is a prevalent and critical aspect of many networking applications and protocols. Most networked protocols and architectures seek to optimize performance over a longer timescale and many have explicit support for repetition. Similarly, most players in networked applications are interested in longer horizons, whether they be firms building a business or typical individuals trying to use a system. Fortunately, the study of repeated interaction between multiple self-interested parties, repeated games, is a well-understood and developed area of economic and game theoretic research. A key conclusion from that literature is that the outcome of the repeated game can differ qualitatively from that of the one-shot game. Nonetheless, the tools of repeated games have rarely if ever been brought to bear on networking problems. Our work presents the descriptive and prescriptive power of repeated game analysis by making specific contributions to several relevant networking problems.(cont.) The applications considered are inherently repeated in practice, yet our research is the first to consider the repeated model for each particular problem. In the case of interdomain routing, we first show that user-directed routing (e.g., overlays) transforms routing into a meaningfully repeated game. This motivates us to consider protocols that integrate incentives into routing systems. In designing such a routing protocol, we again use repeated games to identify important properties including the protocol period and the format of certain protocol fields. Leveraging this insight, we show how it is possible to address the problem of the repeated dynamic and arrive at a more desirable outcome. In the case of multicast overlay networks, we show how repeated games can be used to explain the paradox of cooperative user behavior. In contrast to prior models, our repeated model explains the scaling properties of these networks in an endogenous fashion. This enables meaningful examination of the impact architecture and protocol design decisions have on the system outcome. We therefore use this model, with simulation, to descry system parameters and properties important in building robust networks. These examples demonstrate the important and practical insights that repeated game analysis can yield. Further, we argue that the results obtained in the particular problems stem from properties fundamental to networked applications - and their natural relationship with properties of repeated games.(cont.) This strongly suggests that the tools and techniques of this research can be applied more generally. Indeed, we hope that these results represent the beginning of an increased use of repeated games for the study and design of networked applications.by Michael Moïse Afergan.Ph.D

Review on Radio Resource Allocation Optimization in LTE/LTE-Advanced using Game Theory

Recently, there has been a growing trend toward ap-plying game theory (GT) to various engineering fields in order to solve optimization problems with different competing entities/con-tributors/players. Researches in the fourth generation (4G) wireless network field also exploited this advanced theory to overcome long term evolution (LTE) challenges such as resource allocation, which is one of the most important research topics. In fact, an efficient de-sign of resource allocation schemes is the key to higher performance. However, the standard does not specify the optimization approach to execute the radio resource management and therefore it was left open for studies. This paper presents a survey of the existing game theory based solution for 4G-LTE radio resource allocation problem and its optimization

Providing incentive to peer-to-peer applications

Cooperative peer-to-peer applications are designed to share the resources of participating computers for the common good of ail users. However, users do not necessarily have an incentive to donate resources to the system if they can use the system's resources for free. As commonly observed in deployed applications, this situation adversely affects the applications' performance and sometimes even their availability and usability. While traditional resource management is handled by a centralized enforcement entity, adopting similar solution raises new concerns for distributed peer-to-peer systems. This dissertation proposes to solve the incentive problem in peer-to-peer applications by designing fair sharing policies and enforcing these policies in a distributed manner. The feasibility and practicability of this approach is demonstrated through numerous applications, namely archival storage systems, streaming systems, content distribution systems, and anonymous communication systems

Survey on the state-of-the-art in device-to-device communication: A resource allocation perspective

Device to Device (D2D) communication takes advantage of the proximity between the communicating devices in order to achieve efficient resource utilization, improved throughput and energy efficiency, simultaneous serviceability and reduced latency. One of the main characteristics of D2D communication is reuse of the frequency resource in order to improve spectral efficiency of the system. Nevertheless, frequency reuse introduces significantly high interference levels thus necessitating efficient resource allocation algorithms that can enable simultaneous communication sessions through effective channel and/or power allocation. This survey paper presents a comprehensive investigation of the state-of-the-art resource allocation algorithms in D2D communication underlaying cellular networks. The surveyed algorithms are evaluated based on heterogeneous parameters which constitute the elementary features of a resource allocation algorithm in D2D paradigm. Additionally, in order to familiarize the readers with the basic design of the surveyed resource allocation algorithms, brief description of the mode of operation of each algorithm is presented. The surveyed algorithms are divided into four categories based on their technical doctrine i.e., conventional optimization based, Non-Orthogonal-MultipleAccess (NOMA) based, game theory based and machine learning based techniques. Towards the end, several open challenges are remarked as the future research directions in resource allocation for D2D communication

Logical Networks: Self-organizing Overlay Networks and Overlay Computing Systems: [EPI Proposal V2.0]

Contents 1 Team on March 15, 2010 ...........................................42 Capsule ...........................................52.1 Slogan and logo............................................ 5 2.2 One equation fits all and keywords ................................. 6 2.3 How to read this proposal ...................................... 63 Vertical view ...........................................63.1 Panorama............................................... 6 3.2 General definitions .......................................... 8 3.3 Virtual organization ......................................... 9 3.4 Execution model ........................................... 94 Horizontal view ...............................................94.1 Panorama............................................... 94.2 Arigatoni overlay network ...................................... 10 4.2.1 Arigatoni units........................................ 10 4.2.2 Virtual organizations in Arigatoni ............................. 12 4.2.3 Resource discovery protocol (RDP)............................. 12 4.2.4 Virtual Intermittent Protocol (VIP) ............................ 13 4.2.5 iNeu: librairies for network computing........................... 144.3 Babelchord, a DHT’s tower ..................................... 144.4 Synapse,interconnecting heterogeneous overlay networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154.5 Cross-layer overlay design for geo-sensible applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Diagonal view...............................................175.1 Panorama............................................... 17 5.2 Trees versus graphs: a conflict without a cause .......................... 17 5.3 Fault tolerance ............................................ 18 5.4 Parametricity and universality ................................... 18 5.5 Social networking........................................... 19 5.6 Choice of development platform................................... 19 5.7 Quality metrics for an overlay computer .............................. 19 5.8 Trust and security .......................................... 20 5.9 New models of computations .................................... 216 Topics and time line...............................................226.1 Panorama............................................... 226.2 Topicview............................................... 22 6.2.1 Vertical issues......................................... 22 6.2.2 Horizontal issues ....................................... 22 6.2.3 Diagonalissues........................................ 236.3 Timeview............................................... 23 6.3.1 Short-term .......................................... 23 6.3.2 Medium-term......................................... 24 6.3.3 Long-term........................................... 247 Potential application domains ...........................................247.1 Panorama............................................... 24 7.2 P2P social networks ......................................... 25 7.3 Overlay computer for mobile ad hoc networks........................... 25 7.4 OverStic: the mesh overlay network in Sophia Antipolis ..................... 27 7.5 Reducing the Digital Divide..................................... 28 7.6 GRID applications: scenario for seismic monitoring ....................... 29 7.7 Interconnection of heterogeneous overlay networks ........................ 30 7.8 Toward an overlay network of things (RFID) ........................... 318 Software ...........................................328.1 Panorama............................................... 328.2 Prototype software.......................................... 32 8.2.1 Arigatoni simulator ..................................... 32 8.2.2 Ariwheels........................................... 32 8.2.3 BabelChord.......................................... 36 8.2.4 Synapse............................................ 37 8.2.5 Open-Synapse Client..................................... 38 8.2.6 myTransport Gui....................................... 39 8.2.7 CarPal: a P2P carpooling service ............................. 39 8.2.8 Husky interpreter....................................... 408.3 Potential software .......................................... 41 8.3.1 myMed (in french), see http://www-sop.inria.fr/mymed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 Contracts...........................................439.1 INTERREG Alcotra: myMed,2010-2013.............................. 43 9.2 COLOR:JMED,2010 ........................................ 43 9.3 FP6 FET GlobalComputing: IST AEOLUS, 2006-2010 ..................... 43 9.4 JET TEMPUS DEUKS, 2007-2009................................. 4410 Collaborations ...........................................4411 Self assessment ...........................................4411.1 Trivia ................................................. 45 11.2 Conclusions.............................................. 45We propose foundations for generic overlay networks and overlay computing systems. Such overlays are built over a large number of distributed computational agents, virtually organized in colonies or virtual organizations, and ruled by a leader (broker) who is elected democratically (vox populi, vox dei) or imposed by system administrators (primus inter pares). Every agent asks the broker to log in the colony by declaring the resources that can be offered (with variable guarantees). Once logged in, an agent can ask the broker for other resources. Colonies can recursively be considered as evolved agents who can log in an outermost colony governed by another super-leader. Communications and routing intra-colonies goes through a broker-2-broker PKI-based negotiation. Every broker routes intra- and inter- service requests by filtering its resource routing table, and then forwarding the request first inside its colony, and second outside, via the proper super-leader (thus applying an endogenous-first-estrogen- last strategy). Theoretically, queries are formulæ in first-order logic equipped with a small program used to orchestrate and synchronize atomic formulæ (atomic services). When the client agent receives notification of all (or part of) the requested resources, then the real resource exchange is performed directly by the server(s) agents, without any further mediation of the broker, in a pure peer-to-peer fashion. The proposed overlay promotes an intermittent participation in the colony, since peers can appear, disappear, and organize themselves dynamically. This implies that the routing process may lead to failures, because some agents have quit or are temporarily unavailable, or they were logged out manu militari by the broker due to their poor performance or greediness. We aim to design, validate through simulation, and implement these foundations in an overlay network computer system. (From [Liquori-Cosnard TGC-07 paper])

Live Streaming in P2P and Hybrid P2P-Cloud Environments for the Open Internet

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live media streaming is an emerging technology that reduces the barrier to stream live events over the Internet. However, providing a high quality media stream using P2P overlay networks is challenging and gives raise to a number of issues: (i) how to guarantee quality of the service (QoS) in the presence of dynamism, (ii) how to incentivize nodes to participate in media distribution, (iii) how to avoid bottlenecks in the overlay, and (iv) how to deal with nodes that reside behind Network Address Translators gateways (NATs). In this thesis, we answer the above research questions in form of new algorithms and systems. First of all, we address problems (i) and (ii) by presenting our P2P live media streaming solutions: Sepidar, which is a multiple-tree overlay, and GLive, which is a mesh overlay. In both models, nodes with higher upload bandwidth are positioned closer to the media source. This structure reduces the playback latency and increases the playback continuity at nodes, and also incentivizes the nodes to provide more upload bandwidth. We use a reputation model to improve participating nodes in media distribution in Sepidar and GLive. In both systems, nodes audit the behaviour of their directly connected nodes by getting feedback from other nodes. Nodes who upload more of the stream get a relatively higher reputation, and proportionally higher quality streams. To construct our streaming overlay, we present a distributed market model inspired by Bertsekas auction algorithm, although our model does not rely on a central server with global knowledge. In our model, each node has only partial information about the system. Nodes acquire knowledge of the system by sampling nodes using the Gradient overlay, where it facilitates the discovery of nodes with similar upload bandwidth. We address the bottlenecks problem, problem (iii), by presenting CLive that satisfies real-time constraints on delay between the generation of the stream and its actual delivery to users. We resolve this problem by borrowing some resources (helpers) from the cloud, upon need. In our approach, helpers are added on demand to the overlay, to increase the amount of total available bandwidth, thus increasing the probability of receiving the video on time. As the use of cloud resources costs money, we model the problem as the minimization of the economical cost, provided that a set of constraints on QoS is satisfied. Finally, we solve the NAT problem, problem (iv), by presenting two NAT-aware peer sampling services (PSS): Gozar and Croupier. Traditional gossip-based PSS breaks down, where a high percentage of nodes are behind NATs. We overcome this problem in Gozar using one-hop relaying to communicate with the nodes behind NATs. Croupier similarly implements a gossip-based PSS, but without the use of relaying