Towards a Mobility-Supporting Incentive Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution

The distribution of bulk content such as video streams and system updates is becoming increasingly important on mobile devices. For this kind of data transfers, the application of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm is attractive for content providers, as it allows to leverage clients’ (peers’) resources for the dissemination process. The contribution of resources can be encouraged by applying reciprocal incentives, which prevent a peer from consuming more resources than he contributed to the system. However, reciprocation has drawbacks, e.g., in terms of high energy consumption and low performance, when applied to mobile peers. This work substantiates these problems through measurements and discusses a virtual node concept as a possible solution.