Abstract:

Recently peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming media technology has been of the most popular solution for large-scale streaming applications over the Internet, but its quality of service (QoS) can be seriously degraded by the free-riding problem. In this paper, a content differentiation service (CDS) based incentive mechanism was proposed, wherein the peer’s reputation was computed with two factors: its contribution level and the popularity of the program, then a differentiated program list was returned to the peer in accordance with its reputation value. Hence, the free-riding problem could be restrained by the implementation of content differentiation service. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism can efficiently improve the playback quality in P2P streaming systems.

Key words: P2P streaming; free-riding;　incentive mechanism;　content differentiation service