Gossip Based Streaming with Incentives for Peer Collaboration

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are becoming a popular means of streaming audio and video content but they are prone to bandwidth starvation if selfish peers do not contribute bandwidth to other peers. We prove that an incentive mechanism can be created for a live streaming P2P protocol while preserving the asymptotic properties of randomized gossip based streaming without any incentives. In order to show the utility of our result, we adopt a distributed incentive scheme from P2P file storage literature to the live streaming scenario. We provide simulation results that confirm the ability to achieve a constant download rate (in time, per peer) that is needed for streaming applications on peers. The incentive scheme fairly differentiates peers' download rates according to how much useful bandwidth they contribute back to the P2P system, thus creating a powerful quality of service incentive for peers to contribute bandwidth to other peers. In addition we provide preliminary data from a real implementation of a gossip based streaming application