Defending Against Buffer Map Cheating in DONet-Like P2P Streaming

Data-driven overlay network (DONet)-like P2P system is especially suitable to support live stream applications, since its data structure can tolerate node dynamics quite well. However, optimal streaming demands the cooperation of individual nodes. If selfish nodes cheat about their buffer maps to reduce the forwarding burden, the overall streaming quality would be negatively affected. To defend against this kind of cheating, we design a trustworthy service-differentiation based incentive mechanism with low complexity in this paper. The mechanism is composed of the service-differentiation algorithm and the contribution-evaluation algorithm. Compared with other studies in this area, the primary characteristic of our mechanism lies in two aspects. Firstly, the contribution of each node is evaluated considering the features of live streaming, not just by the transferring bytes. Secondly, the potential cheating behavior of overlay nodes during the fulfillment of incentive algorithms can be avoided, which is usually not considered by other similar studies. Extensive simulations suggest that the algorithms are indeed effective for defending against buffer map cheating in DONet-like P2P streaming.