Providing incentives for video streaming in mesh based P2P networks

The intrinsic deficiencies of traditional client-server networks lead that P2P networks become scalable successors for video streaming in today networks. However, the performance of P2P networks is deeply dependable on the contribution of peers. In fact, some peers only consume services but provide little or nothing into the network; this phenomenon which is called free riding seriously affects the performance of P2P networks. In order to motivate peers to contribute their resources into the P2P networks, using incentive mechanisms is compulsory. 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 P2P 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 to improve the overall quality of the perceived video in the group.