Maximizing streaming quality in heterogeneous overlays through incentives

Abstract

The upload contribution of peers in a peer-to-peer streaming system depends on their willingness to contribute as well as their physical limitation. Several incentive schemes have been proposed to enforce non-willing peers to cooperate. But we find it of great interest to see how physically constrained, with respect to resources, peers can be supported by a streaming application. In this paper we investigate how free-riders, namely non-contributing peers, can be served in a peer-to-peer streaming system. We examine different prioritization schemes that are used by high contributing peers to prioritize other contributing peers over free-riders and show that as the level of prioritization increases, contributing peers receive higher quality but the average quality drops. To avoid this, we propose an incentive mechanism that encourages contributing peers to upload to free-riders so that the average quality experienced by the peers in the overlay is maximized.