On the Impact of Incentives in eMule Analysis and Measurements of a Popular File-Sharing Application Damiano Carra Pietro Michiardi HaniSalah ThorstenStrufe University of Verona Eurecom TU Darmstadt Verona, Italy Sophia Antipolis, France Darmstadt, Germany
[email protected] [email protected] {hsalah,strufe}@cs.tu-darmstadt.de Abstract—Motivated by the popularity of content distribution proven [6], [11], [12], [13] to work well in fostering coopera- and file sharing applications, that nowadays dominate Internet tion among peers, albeit in the short-term, i.e., for the duration traffic, we focus on the incentive mechanism of a very popular, of an individual file exchange. yet not very well studied, peer-to-peer application, eMule. In our work we recognize that the incentive scheme of eMule is The endeavor of this work is to focus on eMule/aMule more sophisticated than current alternatives (e.g. BitTorrent) as it [14], [15], another file-sharing application that is very popular uses a general, priority-based, time-dependent queuing discipline among users (the community counts millions of peers) but less to differentiate service among cooperative users and free-riders. studied in the literature. Specifically, we investigate the built-in In this paper we describe a general model of such an incentive incentive mechanism as it is substantially different from those mechanism and analyze its properties in terms of application performance. We validate our model using both numerical implemented in other P2P applications, but has a wide range 2 simulations (when analytical tractation becomes prohibitive) and of applications, including OCH services (e.g., WUpload ).