Using recurring costs for reputation management in peer-to-peer streaming systems

Due to the dependency on preceding nodes in overlay live streaming systems, only highly reliable nodes should be chosen to occupy vital positions in the overlay topology, serving large numbers of succeeding participants. Otherwise, the highly dynamic and potentially hostile environment with frequent arrivals and departures of participants may lead to high packet loss rates and a significant decrease in quality of service. Hence, a high resilience towards failure of participants and especially deliberate sabotage through malicious parties is a prerequisite for this content distribution scheme to gain acceptance by users and the market. In order to incorporate the reliability of nodes into the topology construction process a stable metric for assessing the reliability of nodes has to be defined that preserves the anonymity of the subscribers and allows coping with their stochastic behavior. In this paper we present eLeumund, an algorithm, which utilizes recurring costs as a means to compute a dependable reputation value representing a node’s reliability for the service. Our scheme maintains the privacy of all participants.