An incentive scheme based on bitrate adaptation for cloud-assisted P2P video-on-demand streaming systems

Hybrid cloud assisted peer-to-peer (P2P) video-on-demand (VoD) systems augment P2P VoD systems with cloud computing infrastructure, with the goal of increasing the available bandwidth resource in the system to guarantee the video playback quality. In such systems, users have the freedom to download videos from both the cloud and the peers in the P2P overlay at will. However, the bandwidth resource provision from the cloud may lead to the well-known “free-riding” problem: a selfish user without any contribution can easily enjoy high video playback quality by only consuming the cloud bandwidth resource. Such free-riding behavior will greatly increase the cloud bandwidth consumption, while decreasing the amount of available bandwidth resource in the system, which further leads to the degradation of the video playback quality. The aim of this paper is to provide service differentiation to encourage the cooperative behavior of users in hybrid VoD system. Concretely, we propose an incentive scheme based on adaptive bitrate streaming method, in which the video playback quality perceived by a user is determined by its upload bandwidth contribution to P2P community. As a consequence, a user who desires to achieve high video playback quality should participate in contribution actively. The results of simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in reducing cloud bandwidth consumption, while guaranteeing the video playback quality for users.