Abstract
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have shown their great strength as an information sharing architecture what we witness from the popularity and the variety of P2P-related applications. Lack of incentives, however, makes most peers unwilling to cooperate and lead to free-riding behavior. The prevalence of free riders will, eventually, bring P2P networks performance and security issues as what traditional client-server architecture encountered. One way to encourage cooperation is through service differentiation based on each peer’s contributions. This paper presents FuzRep, a reputation system that incorporates virtual community and fuzzy logic techniques for P2P networks. Without using information hubs or DHT-like pre-sorting structure, we utilize the clustering effect of virtual communities for reputation management. Furthermore, we treat service discrimination for resource request as a decision-making process so that a fuzzy-based mechanism is adopted in FuzRep to facilitate that process. Finally, the experimental results of this reputation system positively indicate the feasibility of our design.