Pay-to-Play: An Incentive Mechanism for Chaining Protocols for Video Streaming

-We present a voucher-based incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer systems distributing videos on demand using a chaining protocol. In our proposal, clients collect vouchers from the downstream clients to which they forward data, and use these vouchers to reward the upstream clients that send them data. Because these vouchers are signed with the public key of the server, they circulate among the clients without any server intervention. We illustrate the operation of our pay-to-play mechanism with chaining protocols for video-on-demand and discuss how it affects the server’s workload. Keywords— P2P, video-on-demand, chaining.