Utilizing Layered Taxation to provide incentives in P2P streaming systems

Incentive mechanism plays an essential role in guaranteeing the performance of P2P streaming systems. This paper proposed a Credit-line based Layered Taxation (CLT) incentive mechanism, which is fully distributed and does not rely on any central server for credit management. The CLT mechanism also avoids the problem of reputation accumulation in reputation-based systems and trade limitation in the reciprocity-based systems. In addition, the formed layered topology and taxation strategy can inspire peers to contribute their bandwidth, and maximize both individual utility and system utility. Our simulation results indicate that, with our proposed incentive mechanism, cooperative peers can gain much better performance, while free riders would be cleared out of the system. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.