On the design of contribution-aware P2P streaming networks

P2P live streaming networks recently become an emerging research topic. In such multimedia steaming networks, autonomous users cooperate with each other to provide a distributed, scalable, and cost-efficient transmission environment. However, since each user is self-interested such that they want to receive high-quality video with minimum upload bandwidth, full cooperation and stable playback quality can not be guaranteed. This paper proposes the design of a two-phase, contribution-aware mechanism for P2P live streaming networks. We first propose our two-layered system architecture and the problem statements. Then, we propose a contribution-aware mechanism for identifying the stable peers. We also propose the method concept of stimulating peer cooperation in such a hybrid push-pull P2P streaming platform.