Optimal peer selection for P2P downloading and streaming

In a P2P system, a client peer may select one or more server peers to download a specific file. In a P2P resource economy, the server peers charge the client for the downloading. A server peer's price would naturally depend on the specific object being downloaded, the duration of the download, and the rate at which the download is to occur. The optimal peer selection problem is to select, from the set of peers that have the desired object, the subset of peers and download rates that minimizes cost. In this paper we examine a number of natural peer selection problems for both P2P downloading and P2P streaming. For downloading, we obtain the optimal solution for minimizing the download delay subject to a budget constraint, as well as the corresponding Nash equilibrium. For the streaming problem, we obtain a solution that minimizes cost subject to continuous playback while allowing for one or more server peers to fail during the streaming process. The methodologies developed in this paper are applicable to a variety of P2P resource economy problems.