Game-theoretic scalable peer-to-peer media streaming

Peer-to-peer media streaming framework has been widely considered as a promising platform for delivering high quality multimedia content on the global scale. A fundamental requirement is that each peer needs to contribute outgoing bandwidth to deliver media packets to its neighbors. Although most existing protocols mandate such contribution, misbehaving peers may still deliberately limit their outgoing bandwidth to conserve their own resources. This would inevitably lead to performance degradation of other well-behaving peers. It is crucial to have an effective incentive mechanism such that peers are encouraged to contribute. In this paper, we formulate two strategic games to model the interactions between server and its immediate peers and between neighboring peers, respectively. We have devised the equilibrium strategies which relate a peer's streaming performance to its contribution. Simulation results show that the proposed game-theoretical incentive mechanism protects well-behaving peers from being exploited by misbehaving counterparts.