VolunteerLive: Introducing Volunteer Nodes into P2P Live Streaming

In P2P live streaming system, service will be degraded when thousands of semi-riders, peers with very limited outbound bandwidth, concurrently join. Due to the limited outbound bandwidth, a semi-rider peer always gets more data than its contributions. In this paper, we propose VolunteerLive, an incentive-based P2P live streaming model, to address this issue. In VolunteerLive, these asymmetrical users are encouraged to "deposit" their bandwidth resources to relay data using their network bandwidth resources. They can enjoy the services as semi-riders in the future. We also propose ContriMax, a heuristics data scheduling algorithm designed for volunteers to collect and maximize the contributions of them. Simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed VolunteerLive and ContriMax. The results show that VolunteerLive model is feasible to support more semi-riders and greatly decrease the stress on the media server.