Incentive Mechanisms in P2P Media Streaming Systems

摘要

Free riding, whereby a peer utilizes network resources but doesn't contribute services, could have a huge impact on the efficacy of streaming systems, leading to scalability issues and service degradation. BitTorrent-like tit-for-tat mechanisms can't simply be tailored and used in streaming. Even though the free-riding problem is more severe in peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming than in file sharing, the deployed systems still lack incentive schemes. Here, the authors categorize, analyze, and compare a range of incentive mechanisms proposed for P2P streaming systems and discuss the future research issues that must be addressed before these schemes can be deployed in practice.