An incentive scheduling mechanism for peer-to-peer video streaming

P2P video streaming networks are found as a scalable solution and an alternative for traditional client–server based video streaming over the Internet. One of the significant issues affecting the success of any P2P streaming network is cooperation between peers. Practical observations have proved the prevalence of free riders in P2P networks that degrade their performance. To solve this problem, using incentive mechanisms, which encourage peers to contribute more in the network, is necessary. In this paper, we designed and proposed a distributed and scalable incentive mechanism for mesh based P2P video streaming networks. In the proposed approach the contribution of the peers is measured and maintained in a distributed fashion. Furthermore, we proposed an incentive sending side scheduler in which peers are served based on their contribution in the network. Our simulation evaluations show the efficiency of the proposed approach in improving the overall perceived video quality by the non-free rider nodes and consequently in the whole network.     

Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatch problem brings great stress in the Internet infrastructure. It greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique. LTM builds an efficient overlay by disconnecting slow connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.     

Token-based incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer video streaming networks

The Journal of Supercomputing - We consider the problem of live video streaming in peer-to-peer networks consisting of selfish peers aiming at maximizing peers’ individual utilities. We use...     

一种基于公钥体系的P2P激励机制

针对P2P网络的搭便车行为及网络资源的同质化现象,提出了一个基于PKI体系和结构化P2P网络的激励机制。该激励机制不但鼓励节点提供资源下载,还让资源发布者从中受益,从而有效地抑制搭便车行为,减轻了资源的同质化现象。     

A path-traceable query routing mechanism for search in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

Unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become a very popular architecture for content distribution in large-scale and dynamic environments. Searching for content in unstructured P2P networks is a challenging task because the distribution of objects has no association with the organization of peers. Proposed methods in recent years either depend too much on objects replication rate or suffer from a sharp decline in performance when objects stored in peers change rapidly, although their performance is better than flooding or random walk algorithms to some extent. In this paper, we propose a novel query routing mechanism for improving query performance in unstructured P2P networks. We design a data structure called traceable gain matrix (TGM) that records every query's gain at each peer along the query hit path, and allows for optimizing query routing decision effectively. Experimental results show that our query routing mechanism achieves relatively high query hit rate with low bandwidth consumption in different types of network topologies under static and dynamic network conditions.     

An inexpensive unstructured platform for wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks

In this paper, we propose an unstructured platform, namely I nexpensive P eer-to- P eer S ubsystem (IPPS), for wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks. The platform addresses the constraints of expensive bandwidth of wireless medium, and limited memory and computing power of mobile devices. It uses a computationally-, memory requirement- and communication- wise inexpensive gossip protocol as the main maintenance operation, and exploits location information of the wireless nodes to minimize the number of link-level messages for communication between peers. As a result, the platform is not only lightweight by itself, but also provides a low cost framework for different peer-to-peer applications. In addition, further enhancements are introduced to enrich the platform with robustness and tolerance to failures without incurring any additional computational and memory complexity, and communication between peers. In specific, we propose schemes for a peer (1) to chose a partner for a gossip iteration, (2) to maintain the neighbors, and (3) to leave the peer-to-peer network. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the platform.

A token-based incentive mechanism for video streaming applications in peer-to-peer networks

Free-riding is one of the main challenges of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming systems which results in reduction in video streaming quality. Therefore, providing an incentive mechanism for stimulating cooperation is one of the essential requirements to maintain video Quality of Experience (QoE) in such systems. Among the existing mechanisms, payment-based schemes are most suitable for streaming applications due to their low overhead. However, to date, no dynamic payment mechanism has been proposed which can take the stochastic dynamics of the video streaming ecosystem (e.g., the request arrival, demand submission, bandwidth availability, etc.) into account. In this paper, we propose a dynamic token-based payment mechanism in which each peer earns tokens by admitting other peers’ requests and spends tokens for submitting its demands to the others. This system allows the peers to dynamically adjust their income level in adaptation to changes in the system state. We propose a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which the goal of each peer is to obtain a request admission policy which minimizes the expected cumulative cost of consumed bandwidth, while satisfying a long-term constraint on the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of the users as the measure of QoE. The proposed admission policy is adaptive to the request arrival process, bandwidth state and the token bucket length of each peer. To make up for the lack of design-time knowledge of the system’s statistics, each individual peer is equipped with a model-free algorithm to learn its optimal admission policy over the course of real-time interaction with the system. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm against baseline schemes such as: random, token-threshold, bandwidth-threshold and myopic algorithms.     

An incentive compatible reputation mechanism for P2P systems

In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, peers often must interact with unknown or unfamiliar peers without the benefit of trusted third parties or authorities to mediate the interactions. Trust management through reputation mechanism to facilitate such interactions is recognized as an important element of P2P systems. It is, however, faced by the problems of how to stimulate reputation information sharing and honest recommendation elicitation. This paper presents an incentive compatible reputation mechanism for P2P systems. It has two unique features: (1) a recommender’s trustworthiness and level of confidence about the recommendation is considered for a more accurate calculation of reputations and fair evaluation of recommendations. (2) Incentive for participation and honest recommendation is implemented through a fair differential service mechanism. It relies on peer’s level of participation and on the recommendation credibility. Theoretic analysis and simulation show that the reputation mechanism we propose can help peers effectively detect dishonest recommendations in a variety of scenarios where more complex malicious strategies are introduced. Moreover, it can also stimulate peers to send sufficiently honest recommendations. The latter is realized by ensuring that active and honest recommenders, compared to inactive or dishonest ones, can elicit the most honest (helpful) recommendations and thus suffer the least number of wrong trust decisions.     

Linking identical neighborly partitions for efficient high-dimensional similarity search in unstructured peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has recently attracted a great deal of research attention. In a P2P system, a large number of nodes can potentially be pooled together to share their resources, information, and services. However, existing unstructured P2P systems lack support for content-based search over data objects which are generally represented by high-dimensional feature vectors. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective indexing mechanism to facilitate high-dimensional similarity query in unstructured P2P systems, named Linking Identical Neighborly Partitions (LINP), which combines both space partitioning technique and routing index technique. With the aid of LINP, each peer can not only process similarity query efficiently over its local data, but also can route the query to the promising peers which may contain the desired data. In the proposed scheme, each peer summarizes its local data using the space partitioning technique, and exchanges the summarized index with its neighboring peers to construct routing indices. Furthermore, to improve the system performance with peer updates, we propose an extension of the LINP, named LINP⁺, where each peer can reconfigure its neighboring peers to keep relevant peers nearby. The performance of our proposed scheme is evaluated over both synthetic and real-life high-dimensional datasets, and experimental results show the superiority of our proposed scheme.     

Service differentiated peer selection: an incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming

We propose a service differentiated peer selection mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming systems. The mechanism provides flexibility and choice in peer selection to the contributors of the system, resulting in high quality streaming sessions. Free-riders are given limited options in peer selection,if any, and hence receive low quality streaming. The proposed incentive mechanism follows the characteristics of rank-order tournaments theory that considers only the relative performance of the players, and the top prizes are awarded to the winners of the tournament. Using rank-order tournaments, we analyze the behavior of utility maximizing users. Through simulation and wide-area measurement studies, we verify that the proposed incentive mechanism can provide near optimal streaming quality to the cooperative users until the bottleneck shifts from the streaming sources to the network.     

An incentive mechanism to reinforce truthful reports in reputation systems

The success of current trust and reputation systems is on the premise that the truthful feedbacks are obtained. However, without appropriate mechanisms, in most reputation systems, silent and lying strategies usually yield higher payoffs for peers than truthful feedback strategies. Thus, to ensure trustworthiness, incentive mechanisms are highly needed for a reputation system to encourage rational peers to provide truthful feedbacks. In this paper, we model the feedback reporting process in a reputation system as a reporting game. We propose a wage-based incentive mechanism for enforcing truthful report for non-verifiable information in self-interested P2P networks. A set of incentive compatibility constraint rules including participation constraint and self-selection constraints are formulated. We design, implement, and analyze incentive mechanisms and players’ strategies. The extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanisms reinforce truthful feedbacks and achieve optimal welfare.     

Cooperative scheduling mechanism for large-scale peer-to-peer computing systems

Over recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become an important part of Internet. Millions of users have been attracted to their structures and services. P2P computing is a distributed computing paradigm that uses Internet to connect thousands, or even millions, of users into a single large virtual computer based on the sharing of computational resources. One of the most critical aspects to the design of P2P computing systems is the development of scheduling techniques to manage the computational resources efficiently and in a scalable way. This paper proposes a cooperative scheduling mechanism with a two-level topology designed to work on large-scale distributed computing P2P systems. Our main contribution is proposing three criteria that only use local information to schedule tasks thus providing scalability to the overall scheduling system. By setting up these three criteria, the system can be easily adapted to work efficiently with very different kinds of distributed applications. The extensive experimentation carried out justifies the importance of good scheduling in such heterogeneous systems, but also emphasizes the importance of having a scheduling algorithm capable of being adapted to the requirements of different kinds of application.     

改进的非结构化P2P网络搜索算法

如何高效地搜索资源是P2P网络中最为关键的问题.非结构化的对等网络,一般以广播方式作为其搜索的基本策略,引发较大的网络流量.针对以上问题,提出了一种利用节点积累的经验指导节点传播查询的路由搜索算法.在该算法中,通过记录节点关注的主题、主题的信息量大小和满足主题的目标节点,并建立对应关系表.当节点收到查询后,就利用该表来指导节点选择查询,以便更快地找到查询结果.仿真结果表明,该算法有效地减少了查询带来的网络流量,提高了查找的成功率.     

Opportunistic scheduling and incentive mechanism for OFDMA networks with D2D relaying

The device-to-device (D2D) relaying is considered one of promising technologies to improve the spectral efficiency and extend the coverage of the cellular system with low additional costs. In the system with D2D relaying, some of user equipments (UEs) can act as relay stations (RSs) that forward other UEs’ data from/to the base station (BS). Compared with the RS, the D2D relaying has several advantages such as low deployment costs and high flexibility. We study an opportunistic subchannel scheduling problem in the OFDMA cellular network with D2D relaying in this paper. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem to maximize the sum-rate of the system with D2D relaying while satisfying the minimum average data rate requirement for each UE, and then develop an opportunistic scheduling algorithm by solving it. Due to a high computational complexity of the optimal scheduling algorithm, we also propose a heuristic algorithm with a lower computational complexity. In addition, since UEs that participate in D2D relaying sacrifice their resources to relay other UEs’ data, we also study incentive mechanisms to compensate their sacrifices. Through simulation results, we show the performance of our algorithms and the effects of our incentive mechanisms.     

Proactive replication for rare objects in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

Unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have become a very popular architecture for content distribution in large-scale and dynamic environments. The search efficiency problem in unstructured P2P networks has not been adequately addressed so far, especially concerning search for rare objects. In this paper, we propose a proactive replication strategy to improve search efficiency for rare objects. It uses an object-probing technique for peers to decide whether or not to establish replications for their objects when they join the network. This strategy can effectively increase the popularity of rare objects in order to enhance search efficiency. We also present a rare object search algorithm to reduce the overhead caused by the replication strategy. When a peer forwards a search request, the forward probability is calculated according to its neighbors' degrees and the number of neighbors' objects. Therefore, the search request is forwarded to the peers more likely containing target objects. Simulations show that our proactive replication strategy greatly improves search efficiency for rare objects with moderate communication overhead. The rare object search algorithm not only improves search efficiency for rare objects, but also achieves load balance in search.     

Ad-hoc limited scale-free models for unstructured peer-to-peer networks

Several protocol efficiency metrics (e.g., scalability, search success rate, routing reachability and stability) depend on the capability of preserving structure even over the churn caused by the ad-hoc nodes joining or leaving the network. Preserving the structure becomes more prohibitive due to the distributed and potentially uncooperative nature of such networks, as in the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Thus, most practical solutions involve unstructured approaches while attempting to maintain the structure at various levels of protocol stack. The primary focus of this paper is to investigate construction and maintenance of scale-free topologies in a distributed manner without requiring global topology information at the time when nodes join or leave. We consider the uncooperative behavior of peers by limiting the number of neighbors to a pre-defined hard cutoff value (i.e., no peer is a major hub), and the ad-hoc behavior of peers by rewiring the neighbors of nodes leaving the network. We also investigate the effect of these hard cutoffs and rewiring of ad-hoc nodes on the P2P search efficiency.     

An efficient incentive scheme with a distributed authority infrastructure in peer-to-peer networks

Today’s peer-to-peer networks are designed based on the assumption that the participating nodes are cooperative, which does not hold in reality. Incentive mechanisms that promote cooperation must be introduced. However, the existing incentive schemes (using either reputation or virtual currency) suffer from various attacks based on false reports. Even worse, a colluding group of malicious nodes in a peer-to-peer network can manipulate the history information of its own members, and the damaging power increases dramatically with the group size. Such malicious nodes/collusions are difficult to detect, especially in a large network without a centralized authority. In this paper, we propose a new distributed incentive scheme, in which the amount that a node can benefit from the network is proportional to its contribution, malicious nodes can only attack others at the cost of their own interests, and a colluding group cannot gain advantage by cooperation regardless of its size. Consequently, the damaging power of colluding groups is strictly limited. The proposed scheme includes three major components: a distributed authority infrastructure, a key sharing protocol, and a contract verification protocol.     

A mechanism that provides incentives for truthful feedback in peer-to-peer systems

We propose a mechanism for providing the incentives for reporting truthful feedback in a peer-to-peer system for exchanging services (or content). This mechanism is to complement reputation mechanisms that employ ratings’ feedback on the various transactions in order to provide incentives to peers for offering better services to others. Under our approach, each of the transacting peers (rather than just the client) submits a rating on the performance of their mutual transaction. If these are in disagreement, then both transacting peers are punished, since such an occasion is a sign that one of them is lying. The severity of each peer’s punishment is determined by his corresponding non-credibility metric; this is maintained by the mechanism and evolves according to the peer’s record. When under punishment, a peer does not transact with others. We model the punishment effect of the mechanism in a peer-to-peer system as a Markov chain that is experimentally proved to be very accurate. According to this model, the credibility mechanism leads the peer-to-peer system to a desirable steady state isolating liars. Then, we define a procedure for the optimization of the punishment parameters of the mechanism for peer-to-peer systems of various characteristics. We experimentally prove that this optimization procedure is effective and necessary for the successful employment of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems. Then, the optimized credibility mechanism is combined with reputation-based policies to provide a complete solution for high performance and truthful rating in peer-to-peer systems. The combined mechanism was experimentally proved to deal very effectively with large fractions of collaborated liar peers that follow static or dynamic rational lying strategies in peer-to-peer systems with dynamically renewed population, while the efficiency loss induced to sincere peers by the presence of liars is diminished. Finally, we describe the potential implementation of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems.     

Distributed caching in unstructured peer-to-peer file sharing networks

Nowadays, the peer-to-peer (P2P) system is one of the largest Internet bandwidth consumers. To relieve the burden on Internet backbone and improve the query and retrieve performance of P2P file sharing networks, efficient P2P caching algorithms are of great importance. In this paper, we propose a distributed topology-aware unstructured P2P file caching infrastructure and design novel placement and replacement algorithms to achieve optimal performance. In our system, for each file, an adequate number of copies are generated and disseminated at topologically distant locations. Unlike general believes, our caching decisions are in favor of less popular files. Combined with the underlying topology-aware infrastructure, our strategy retains excellent performance for popular objects while greatly improves the caching performance for less popular files. Overall, our solution can reduce P2P traffic on Internet backbone, and relieve the over-caching problem that has not been properly addressed in unstructured P2P networks. We carry out simulation experiments to compare our approaches with several traditional caching strategies. The results show that our algorithms can achieve better query hit rates, smaller query delay, higher cache hit rates, and lower communication overhead.