Design of a Hybrid Architecture for P2P Network

Free rider detection plays a very important role in the stability of a P2P network. Free riders tend to utilize the benefits from the network by downloading files from it without giving back to the network. This has adverse effect on the quality and lifetime of the whole network. Various approaches have been developed for mitigating free-riding; most of them are suffering from some limitations with regard to having correctly represented behavior at the peers and preventing the distribution of fake or duplicate files. To overcome these shortcomings, this work proposes a dynamically assigned grace period and a content scanning mechanism to prevent free riders and stop peers from uploading repeated and fake files in the network. Prototype of the syste was implemented with C# programming language and tested on a simulated network. The result showed that the system achieved a free rider detection rate of up to 60%, a duplicate file detection rate of 66%, and a fake file detection rate of 33% at a network size of 2000 peers. These results reflect the efficiency of the hybrid architecture in solving significant questions of free riding and authenticity of content for the more stable and secure development of the P2P environment.