A barter-based incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming

The cooperation among peers has been a key factor in the success of peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming systems. However, practical observations corroborate the prevalence of free riders in existing P2P systems, which significantly degrade the performance of the systems. In this paper, we investigate the design of an incentive mechanism for P2P media streaming and propose a barter-based incentive mechanism. By making peers possess symmetrical ability to serve each other, our proposed mechanism allows for direct reciprocity between peers, thereby greatly reducing the complexity of encouraging peers to contribute and preventing peers from free riding. Moreover, cheating behavior of malicious peers can be detected and thwarted in an effective and lightweight manner. The experimental results show that our proposed incentive mechanism can boost the cooperation level among peers and thus the scalability of the system.