A dynamic bandwidth pricing mechanism based on trust management in P2P streaming systems

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems rely on that peers voluntarily share their bandwidth to maintain high performance. Credit-based incentive mechanisms are widely used to encourage peers to share more bandwidth. However, in credit-based mechanisms, how to set a suitable bandwidth price is a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic bandwidth pricing mechanism based on Stackelberg game and trust management. This mechanism can dynamically adjust the bandwidth price based on peers' trust values: the lower trust a peer has, the higher price the peer pays. A Stackelberg game is formulated to obtain peers' optimal bandwidth pricing and purchasing strategies. Through mathematical analysis, we derive the equilibrium of our proposed game and an algorithm to obtain equilibrium is also proposed. Extensive simulations show that our proposed mechanism can effectively induce peers to share more bandwidth, maintain system fairness and defend typical data pollution attack to guarantee the robustness of the system.