AN IMPROVED RANK-BASED INCENTIVE MECHANISM FOR PEER-TO-PEER MEDIA STREAMING

Peer-to-peer technology has been a cost-effective solution for, media streaming, because it can take full advantage of the abundant resources of the clients which have been neglected during a long period. P2P systems depend on voluntary resource contributions by individual peers. However, the existence of selfish and malicious peers and their non-collaborative behaviors heavily damage the whole performance of the peer-to-peer system. In this paper, we propose an improved rank-based incentive mechanism to urge selfish peers to behave collaboratively. We first make an analysis to a rank-based incentive mechanism which was proposed by Habib, et al. After this, we find that there are some deficiencies in this incentive mechanism. Thus, we adopt an approach based on punishment to refine the mechanism mentioned above. Our preliminary results verify that the improved incentive mechanism provides a good quality of service and availably control the behaviors of selfish peers.