Natural selection in peer-to-peer streaming: from the cathedral to the bazaar

ABSTRACT

Success of peer-to-peer applications in many cases is attributed to user altruism, where a user contributes some of its own resources to facilitate performance of other users. This observation has been corroborated with some experimental evidence. In this paper we make a first attempt to demonstrate that there are many scenarios where peer-to-peer resource sharing is a natural behavior that selfish users can use to improve their own performance. In particular we examine such natural incentives that exist in a streaming media application which lead such greedy users to cooperate and share resources with each other in forming an efficient overlay multicast tree. We define a freestyle Bazaar environment in which streaming media receivers interact with each other and cooperatively construct an overlay tree for improving their perception of media streams from a single server. Through simulations we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed environment.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
market model, media streaming, peer-to-peer networks