Combating P2P File Pollution with Co-alerting

Abstract

Recently, serious file pollution has been identified in some popular file sharing P2P applications and addressed by several studies. Solving this issue can be done by setting up a model to describe the problem precisely and locate the vital factors aiming to enhance or annihilate file pollution. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for the study of file pollution on P2P file sharing networks and a novel anti-pollution method called "co-alerting". Results of a series of simulations based on the established model show that the user grouppsilas slackness attribute has a remarkable influence on the time-dynamic characteristics of a P2P file pollution process. Simulation results also show that our co-alerting approach acts well as an efficient countermeasure against file pollution, because it can reshape the distribution of user grouppsilas slackness degree and make file sharing in P2P systems more resistant to file pollution attempts.