Score-based Incentive Mechanism (SIM) for live multimedia streaming in peer-to-peer network

Abstract

A decentralized model is primarily used for communication and file transfer, the peer-to-peer network is based on this model. The field of real-time communication and media streaming has witnessed enormous growth in recent times owing to their use of peer-to-peer network. A significant part of Internet traffic is being created by the peer-to-peer network resulting in an increase in its demand. The rise in prominence of peer-to-peer network can be attributed to its properties like resource utilization and distributed nature. Resource utilization of peer-to-peer network is one foremost motive for selecting this network over the traditional client-server architecture. The availability of selfish peer or free riders affects the total resource utilization and degrades the performance of the network. So, there is a requirement of an incentive-based mechanism to motivate the selfish peer or free riders in the network to improve the performance of the network. In this paper, we will discuss a new score based incentive mechanism to improve the overall resource utilization. This approach is based on a reward-punishment based method, so the peers are encouraged or motivated to share more resources and chastise selfish peers. For calculating the score value of a peer, parameters like upload capacity, video quality, control packets, a time period for which peers stay in the network can be used. Different score values are assigned for different parameters. The simulation results presented in this paper verify the approach and illustrate that the quality of video and performance of network improves using our new score based incentive mechanism. The parameters used for calculating the performances are; end-to-end delay, playback delay, start-up delay, and frame redundancy etc.