An Incentive Mechanism to Mitigate the Free-riding in VoD Streaming over Hybrid CDN-P2P Networks

Peer organization is one of the most challenging issues in peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems. Free-riding reduces the overall performance of these systems. The peers placed closer to the video source will have a higher quality of service. Therefore, we can mitigate the free-riding effect and encourage peers to increase uploading participation by putting peers with more upload bandwidth closer to the video sources and setting free riders far from these video sources. In this paper, we propose a distributed incentive mechanism, which extensively enhances mesh-based P2P video-on-demand streaming systems. In our proposed mechanism, peers will organize an overlay based on their playback point and contributed upload bandwidth. This mechanism applies to both P2P, and hybrid CDN-P2P approaches. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposal in term of the quality of service, robustness in dynamic environments and resiliency against free riding.