Incentivizing upload capacity in P2P-VoD systems: A game theoretic analysis

Abstract

Free riding has long been a serious problem in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems due to the selfish behavior of individual users. To conquer this problem, a key design issue of the P2P systems is to appropriately incentivize users to contribute resources. In P2P Video-on-Demand (VoD) applications, content providers need to incentivize the peers to dedicate bandwidth and upload data to one another so as to alleviate the upload workload of their content servers. In this paper, we design a simple yet practical incentive mechanism that rewards each peer based on its dedicated upload bandwidth. We use a mean field interaction model to characterize the distribution of number of peers in different video segments, based on which we characterize the content providers' uploading cost as a function of the peers' contribution. By using a game theoretic framework, we analyze the interaction between a content provider's rewarding strategy and the peers' contributing behaviors and derive a unique Stackelberg equilibrium. We further analyze the system efficiency in terms of the price of anarchy. Via extensive simulations, we validate the stability and efficiency of our incentive scheme. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.