Hotspot Avoidance for P2P Streaming Distribution Application: A Game Theoretic Approach

Today´s peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming application periodically suffers from routing hotspots, which are also known as flash crowds. A routing hotspot is typically created by an unanticipated new event that triggers an unanticipated surge of users to request streaming service from some particular peers, temporarily overwhelming the peer´s delivery capabilities. In this paper, we propose novel methods that avoid routing hotspots proactively, that is, prior to a congestion event. More specifically, we define an incentive-compatible pricing vector explicitly and show that the hotspot can be avoided if all nodes in the network follow the incentive-compatible pricing policy. In order to apply this mechanism to the P2P streaming distribution applications, we propose an adaptive algorithm for distributed computation of the incentive-compatible pricing vector. The simulation results show that the incentive-compatible pricing mechanism can avoid the routing hotspot effectively.