Abstract: To encourage peers in P2P network to provide their storage space saving replications and strengthen cooperation between them, the replication strategy based on incentive mechanism was put forward using information economics about principal-agent relationship and the incentive concept for reference. The experimental results show that the proposed replication strategy can weaken the negative effect brought about by noncooperation between peers as far as possible to create replications successfully, and indeed improve search performance of P2P networks to a certain extent. Compared with classical replication strategies, the new method can reduce search response time, promote search success ratio and balance peers load.

Key words: replication, incentive mechanism, principal-peer, agent-peer, P2P network