Report- and Reciprocity-Based Incentive Mechanisms for Live and On-Demand P2P Video Streaming

The popularity of video streaming in the Internet has continuously increased and traffic generated by such applications has become a large portion of the Internet traffic. The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach is becoming popular due to better scalability and reduced distribution cost. Live streaming and Video-on-Demand (VoD) are two fields of video streaming which have been treated as completely different; they are, however, from a user’s point of view, very similar. Users of a P2P system already successfully collaborate on distributing video streams, thus, allowing for an integrated collaboration by having peers store video streams watched in the past to enable their distribution in the future. Since key P2P properties, such as scalability and cost savings, depend on the effectiveness of the underlying incentive mechanism, this paper (1) proposes report and reciprocity-based incentive mechanisms as candidates to address the proposed scenario and (2) outlines major requirements.