Optimal Peer Selection in a Free-Market Peer-Resource Economy

Abstract: In a P2P free-market resource economy a client peermay want to select multiple server peers for either downloading afile or streaming a stored audio or video object. In general, multipleserver peers will make the object available, with each peer offeringa different price. The optimal peer selection problem is to selectfrom a subset of the peers those peers that can provide the serviceat lowest cost. In this paper we formulate and solve the problemof optimally selecting a subset of peers...