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A comprehensive study of the use of advertisements as incentives in P2P streaming systems

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Abstract

P2P streaming systems, such as PPLive and PPStream, have become popular services with the widespread deployment of broadband networks. However, P2P streaming systems still face free-riding problems, similar to those that have been observed in P2P file sharing systems. Thus, one important problem in providing streaming services is that of providing appropriate incentives for peers to contribute their upload capacity. To this end, we propose the use of advertisements as an incentive for peers to contribute upload capacity. In the proposed framework, peers enjoy the same quality of streamed media, with the difference in quality of service being achieved through different amounts of advertisements viewed, based on the resource contributions to the system. Moreover, since calculating peers’ contributions accurately is important to successfully deploying such systems, we design a token-based framework to address this problem. An extensive simulation-based study is performed to evaluate the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that our approach provides appropriate incentives for peers to contribute their resources. Furthermore, we explore several characteristics of the token-based mechanism which can provide system developers with insight into efficient development of such systems.

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Notes

  1. BitTorrent: http://www.bittorrent.com/

  2. PPLive: http://www.pplive.com/

  3. PPStream: http://www.ppstream.com/

  4. TVUPlayer: http://www.tvunetworks.com/

  5. YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/

  6. Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/

  7. In our system, we encrypt tokens, rather than use digital signatures. The main reason is that use of encryption results in a more secure protocol than one with digital signatures. We discuss this in more detail in Section 4.

  8. PPLive Project: http://cairo.cs.uiuc.edu/~longvu2/pplive.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, 941 W. 37th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0781, USA

    Bo-Chun Wang & Leana Golubchik

  2. Nokia Research Center, Beijing, China

    Alix L. H. Chow

Authors
  1. Bo-Chun Wang
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  2. Alix L. H. Chow
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  3. Leana Golubchik
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bo-Chun Wang.

Additional information

A preliminary 6-page version of this study is going to appear in the Proceedings of Multimedia Systems, 2012 [25]. The conference version presents the basic idea of using advertisements as incentives in P2P streaming systems. Because calculating peers’ contributions accurately is one of key factors in deploying such systems, in this extended version, here we present a comprehensive token-based framework to address this problem. Moreover, we propose three token-based schemes and describe each scheme in detail. The motivation for considering several schemes is to explore characteristics of these schemes, such as overhead, reliability, management, and resilience to malicious behavior. The information can help system developers choose appropriate schemes by considering the trade-offs between overhead and reliability. We also explore how to reduce overhead needed for implementing such token-based schemes. As a result, this extended version is a much more thorough and authoritative presentation of our work.

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Wang, BC., Chow, A.L.H. & Golubchik, L. A comprehensive study of the use of advertisements as incentives in P2P streaming systems. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 7, 555–571 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-012-0155-5

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