The Maze Peer-To-Peer System
The Maze-Peer-To-Peer System was built up by academics from Peking University and Microsoft Research Asia to improve data transfer across the high-bandwidth CERNET (China Education and Research Network). It consists of more than 1.4 million registered users (2004) and roughly 13TB of data are exchanged daily.
Maze's incentive system
Maze uses a simple point incentive system to prevent users from free-riding. Peers consume points by downloading and earn points by uploading files. According to their point total P, peer's download requests are queued by and provided with higher bandwidth. In order to encourage uploading and to prevent imposing hardships on peers with slow links and those holding many unpopular files, a rule was established which gives uploading more points than downloading. Furthermore, new peers get bootstrapping points to download at least 3GB of data before its downloads are throttled.
