A New Revenue Model for P2P Real-Time Multimedia Communications in Small High-Interactive Groups

New service providers, completely separated from the Internet Service Providers (ISP), are growing today in the Internet scenario to create new multimedia services through the P2P approach. These providers are manifesting great interest not only for classical multimedia applications, like video streaming and video on demand, but also for other applications, like for example video-conferencing, multi-party games, private video-chat rooms, and real-time video teaching for e-learning, that usually contain a small number of group members, and the groups are often created and destroyed relatively dynamically. For this kind of applications, use of the P2P approach constitutes a challenging research activity in the immediate future. In addition, new business models are needed to support the economical growth of these kinds of providers. An idea at the basis of the paper is that users are divided in two classes, according to the way they pay the service: in bandwidth (cheap-tariff peers), or with some money (full-tariff peers). The target of this paper is to define a revenue model for providers of services of a new P2P-based platform for multipoint communications for small groups of high-interactive users.