A New Auction Based Approach to Efficient P2P Live Streaming

P2P live media streaming systems have proliferated and become indispensable vehicles for Internet based entertainment applications. However, it is also well known that scalability of such systems is limited by the lack of proper incentive mechanisms. Specifically, it is notoriously hard to efficiently allocate upload bandwidth at each peer so as to maximize overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a new auction based mechanism for optimizing the allocation of upload bandwidth at each peer. One of the distinctive features in our approach is that peers use real"goods" (i.e., their own bandwidth resources) for payments, instead of relying on some fictitious currency. Essentially, peers use a barter mechanism in the payment step in the auction. Simulation results indicate that our proposed auction approach consistently outperforms existing practical approaches (e.g., tit for tat) in terms of average incoming stream rate, average playback delay, and control packets ratio.