Coercion builds cooperation in dynamic and heterogeneous P2P live streaming networks

摘要

Sustaining reasonable performance in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network is contingent upon cooperation among peers. As autonomous agents, peers cooperate only when they are incentivized to do so. Typically, incentives are provided through bilateral exchange of useful data, in a tit-for-tat manner. Unfortunately, good for file sharing and video-on-demand systems as they are, such incentive schemes are ineffective in live streaming systems due mainly to the lack of sufficient opportunity to allow such reciprocity to happen, as recently demonstrated in a pioneering quantitative study. The key insight is that with stringent time constraint, good system performance can only be sustained by judicious peer selection.