Modeling User Behavior in P2P Data Storage System

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing interest in systems for sharing resources, which were originally used for personal purposes by individual users, among many unspecified users via a network. An example of such systems is a peer-to-peer (P2P) data storage system that enables users to share a portion of unused space in their own storage devices among themselves. In a recent paper on a P2P data storage system, the user behavior model was defined based on supply and demand functions that depend only on the storage space unit price in a virtual marketplace. However, it was implicitly assumed that other factors, such as unused space of storage devices possessed by users and additional storage space asked by users, did not affect the characteristics of the supply and demand functions. In addition, it was not clear how the values of parameters used in the user behavior model were determined. Therefore, in this paper, we modify the supply and demand functions and determine the values of their parameters by taking the above mentioned factors as well as the price structure of storage devices in a real marketplace into account. Moreover, we provide a numerical example to evaluate the social welfare realized by the P2P data storage system as a typical application of the modified supply and demand functions.