Improving Deployability of Peer-Assisted CDN Platform with Incentive

As a promising solution to manage the huge workload of large-scale VoD services, managed peer-assisted CDN systems, such as P4P has attracted attention. Although the approach works well in theory or in a controlled environment, to our best knowledge, there have been no general studies that address how actual peers can be incentivized in the wild Internet; thus, deployablity of the system with respect to incentives to users has been an open issue. With this background in mind, we propose a new business model that aims to make peer-assisted approaches more feasible. The key idea of the model is that users sell their idle resources back to ISPs. In other words, ISPs can leverage resources of cooperative users by giving them explicit incentives, e.g., virtual currency. We show the high-level framework of designing optimal incentive amount to users. We also analyze how incentives and other external factors affect the efficiency of the system through simulation. Finally, we discuss other fundamental factors that are essential for the deployability of managed peer-assisted model. We believe that the new business model and the insights obtained through this work are useful for assessing the practical design and deployment of managed peer-assisted CDNs.