Mastering selfishness and heterogeneity in mobile P2P content distribution networks with multiple source download in cellular networks

Abstract

The performance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content distribution networks depends highly on the coordination of the peers. This is especially true for cellular networks with mobile and often selfish users, as the resource constraints on accessible bandwidth and battery power are even more limitating in this context. Thus, it is a major challenge to identify mobile network specific problems and to develop sophisticated cooperation strategies to overcome these difficulties. Cooperation strategies, which are able to cope these problems, are the foundation for efficient mobile file exchange. The detailed performance of the strategies are determined by the peer capabilities and the peer behavior, such as the number of parallel upload connections, the selfishness, or the altruistic re-distribution of data. The purpose of this work is to evaluate and investigate different cooperation strategies which are based on multiple source download and select the best one for mobile scenarios with even leeching peers, i.e. peers which depart as soon as they have finished their download. The question arises whether the cooperation strategy can smoothen the overall performance degradation caused by a selfish peer behavior. As performance indicators the efficiency, fairness, and robustness of the cooperation strategies are applied. The considered scenarios comprise best-case (altruistic peers) and worst-case scenarios (selfish peers). We further propose a new cooperation strategy to improve the file transfer even when mainly selfish peers are present, the CycPriM (cyclic priority masking) strategy. The strategy allows an efficient P2P based content distribution using ordered chunk delivery with only local information available at a peer.