Incentive Mechanism Design for Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

摘要

With high scalability, high video streaming quality, and low bandwidthrequirement, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become a popular way to exchangefiles and deliver multimedia content over the internet. However, current P2Psystems are suffering from "free-riding" due to the peers' selfish nature. Inthis paper, we propose a credit-based incentive mechanism to encourage peers tocooperate with each other in a heterogeneous network consisting of wired andwireless peers. The proposed mechanism can provide differentiated service topeers with different credits through biased resource allocation. A Stackelberggame is formulated to obtain the optimal pricing and purchasing strategies,which can jointly maximize the revenue of the uploader and the utilities of thedownloaders. In particular, peers' heterogeneity and selfish nature are takeninto consideration when designing the utility functions for the Stackelberggame. It is shown that the proposed resource allocation scheme is effective inproviding service differentiation for peers and stimulating them to makecontribution to the P2P streaming system.