Coalition-Based Resource Reciprocation Strategies for P2P Multimedia Broadcasting

In this paper, we consider a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, where multimedia streams are broadcast by matched peers based on their resource reciprocation profiles. We propose a new framework where each peer creates a coalition of matched peers with which it can exchange resources in order to improve its utility. The utility is determined based on explicit consideration of the peer´s multimedia attributes and the quality derived by the peers´ reciprocation behavior. We adopt the proportional bargaining solution to negotiate the upload bandwidth among the matched peers. Proportional bargaining allows to determine each peer´s optimal (in a Pareto optimal sense) upload rates in a coalition in terms of its utility impact. The impact of an incoming peer on the coalition value, which represents the collective utility achieved by the peers in a coalition, is assessed by explicitly investigating the coalition value improvement. Finally, our results show that the proposed coalition-based resource reciprocation can improve the resource allocation/scheduling algorithms deployed in existing P2P systems such as BitTorrent and CoolStreaming. We also discuss how the proposed resource reciprocation approach can be implemented in other multimedia broadcasting applications.