Sustaining collaboration in multicast despite rational collusion

Abstract

This paper focuses on designing incentive mechanisms for overlay multicast systems. Existing proposals on the problem are no longer able to provide proper incentives when rational users collude or launch sybil attacks. To overcome this key limitation, we propose a novel decentralized DCast multicast protocol and prove that it offers a novel concept of safety-net guarantee: A user running the protocol will always obtain at least a reasonably good utility despite the deviation of any number of rational users that potentially collude or launch sybil attacks. © 2011 Authors.