An incentive mechanism for Peer-to-Peer video streaming

Increase in the number of audiences interested in watching live events through the internet has become a challenge for traditional client-server approaches. In fact, supporting manifold audiences requires that broadcasters allocate more bandwidth. P2P networks for live streaming allow the users to support video dissemination by contributing their resources. Consequently, P2P networks are effective and scalable alternative for video streaming in the network. Since the performance of a P2P streaming system is dependent on the contribution of the group members, free riding is one of the main challenges of such systems. Free riders are some selfish peers that do not upload any data to other peers while downloading from the network. Therefore, designing incentive mechanisms for P2P streaming systems is essential. In this paper we designed and proposed an incentive mechanism for mesh based P2P video streaming. The proposed approach includes two parts. In the first part, the contribution of the peers in the network is measured and maintained in a distributed fashion, and in the second part, differentiated service is provided for the peers based on their contribution. We simulated the proposed approach and the results show the efficiency of the proposed mechanism in improving the overall quality of the perceived video in the group.