An Incentive Based Peer-to-Peer Protocol for Anonymous Collaborative Mobile Streaming

Recent protocols in collaborative mobile streaming require nodes or peers to stream video packets in an ad hoc manner to ensure robustness and anonymity. However, the end nodes are provided with no incentives to do so. Such an approach works well in a scenario of co-operative nodes but many scenarios involve end-nodes trying to minimize their costs. In this paper, we introduce an incentive based protocol for anonymous collaborative streaming among mobiles based on dynamic rewards and punishments, for nodes to determine when to stream. Results show improvements over ad hoc methods in average download costs, cost variation and settling time for minimal hop delay. Further, we also show that in the presence of the incentive, neighbour information may be exchanged less frequently to sustain the network.