P2P Streaming Systems: a Study on the Use of Advertisements as Incentives

P2P streaming systems, such as PPLive, PPStream, and TVUPlayer, have become popular services with the widespread deployment of broadband networks. However, P2P streaming systems still face free-riding problems, similar to those that have been observed in P2P file sharing systems. Thus, one important problem in providing streaming services is that of providing appropriate incentives for peers to contribute their upload capacity. To this end, in this paper, we propose the use of advertisements as an incentive for peers to contribute upload capacity. In the proposed system, peers enjoy the same quality of streamed media, with the difference in quality of service being achieved through different amounts of advertisements they view, based on their resource contributions to the system. We also present an extensive simulation-based study, used to evaluate the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach can provide appropriate incentives for peers to contribute their resources to the system. Keywords-P2P streaming systems; incentives; advertisements; token-based systems.