Peer-Assisted Content Distribution With Prices

Peer-assisted content distribution matches user demand for content with available supply at other peers in the network. Inspired by this supply-and-demand interpretation of the nature of content sharing, the authors employ price theory to study peer-assisted content distribution. The market-clearing prices are those which align supply and demand, and the system is studied through the characterization of price equilibria. They discuss the efficiency and robustness gains of price-based multilateral exchange, and show that simply maintaining a single price per peer (even across multiple files) suffices to achieve these benefits.