Optimally DoS Resistant P2P Topologies for Live Multimedia Streaming

Using a peer-to-peer approach for live multimedia streaming applications offers the promise to obtain a highly scalable, decentralized, and robust distribution service. When constructing streaming topologies, however, specific care has to be taken in order to ensure that quality of service requirements in terms of delay, jitter, packet loss, and stability against deliberate denial of service attacks are met. In this paper, we concentrate on the latter requirement of stability against denial-of-service attacks. We present an analytical model to assess the stability of overlay streaming topologies and describe attack strategies. Building on this, we describe topologies, which are optimally stable toward perfect attacks based on global knowledge, and give a mathematical proof of their optimality. The formal construction and analysis of these topologies using global knowledge lead us to strategies for distributed procedures, which are able to construct resilient topologies in scenarios, where global knowledge can not be gathered. Experimental results show that the topologies created in such a real-world scenario are close to optimally stable toward perfect denial of service attacks.