An Incentive Scheme for Optimizing the Performance of Data-Driven P2P Streaming System

In the recent years, Internet has witnessed a rapid growth in the deployment of data-driven based peer-to-peer streaming systems. The power of such system arises from the altruism of participating nodes in the system. However, as the system grows larger, the assumption of altruism breaks down since the system may include selfish nodes, which consume the resources provided by other nodes, without contributing any resource to the system. Therefore, the behaviors of selfish nodes will lead to the unfair society as well as the degradation in overall performance of the system. The aim of this paper is to encourage the service providing of nodes in the data-driven P2P streaming system. We first introduce a market model into P2P streaming. In the market, service providers price their services and allocate their bandwidth resource to its consumers, in order to maximize their revenues. Service consumers have the freedom to choose the favorite providers and have to pay for the services they consume. We prove that the optimal system performance can be achieved if each service provider adopts the proper strategy for service pricing and bandwidth allocation. Based on the analysis of market model, we then propose a distributed incentive scheme to encourage the cooperative behaviors of nodes and optimize the system performance concurrently. The results of simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed incentive scheme.