Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
Abstract
An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant
amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the
Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that almost 70%
of Gnutella users share no files, and nearly 50% of all responses are
returned by the top 1% of sharing hosts. Furthermore, we found out
that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one
group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that
volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable
ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system
performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend
continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible
collapse of such systems.
Pre-print last modified: 9/19/00
Full paper: First Monday Oct. 2000 or PDF (9/19 version)
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