Incentive Cooperation Strategies for Peer-to-Peer Live Multimedia Streaming Social Networks

Multimedia social networks have become an emerging research area, in which analysis and modeling of the behavior of users who share multimedia are of ample importance in understanding the impact of human dynamics on multimedia systems. In peer-to-peer live-streaming social networks, users cooperate with each other to provide a distributed, highly scalable and robust platform for live streaming applications. However, every user wishes to use as much bandwidth as possible to receive a high-quality video, while full cooperation cannot be guaranteed. This paper proposes a game-theoretic framework to model user behavior and designs incentive-based strategies to stimulate user cooperation in peer-to-peer live streaming. We first analyze the Nash equilibrium and the Pareto optimality of two-person game and then extend to multiuser case. We also take into consideration selfish users' cheating behavior and malicious users' attacking behavior. Both our analytical and simulation results show that the proposed strategies can effectively stimulate user cooperation, achieve cheat free, attack resistance and help to provide reliable services.