A free-riding resiliency incentive mechanism for VoD streaming over hybrid CDN-P2P networks

Peer organization is one of the most important issues in peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems. Free-riding extremely reduces the overall performance of these systems. The peers placed closer to the video source will have a higher quality of service. Therefore, we can mitigate the free-riding effect and encourage peers to increase uploading participation by putting peers with more upload bandwidth closer to the video sources and setting free riders far from these video sources. In this paper, we propose a distributed incentive mechanism, which extensively enhance mesh-based P2P video-on-demand (VoD) streaming systems. In our proposed mechanism, peers will organize an overlay based on their playback point and contributed upload bandwidth. This mechanism applies to both P2P, and hybrid CDN-P2P approaches. The comprehensive results of our simulation show the efficiency of the proposed mechanism in term of the quality of service, robustness in dynamic environments and resiliency against free riding in the network.