Cooperative Peer-to-Peer Streaming: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach

While peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems have achieved promising results, they introduce a large number of unnecessary traverse links, which consequently leads to substantial network inefficiency. To address this problem and achieve better streaming performance, we propose to enable cooperation among "group peers", which are geographically neighboring peers with large intra-group upload and download bandwidths. Considering the peers' selfish nature, we formulate the cooperative streaming problem as an evolutionary game and derive, for every peer, the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which is the stable Nash equilibrium (NE) and no one will deviate from. Moreover, we propose a simple and distributed learning algorithm for the peers to converge to the ESSs. With the proposed algorithm, each peer decides whether to be an agent who downloads data from the peers outside the group or a free-rider who downloads data from the agents by simply tossing a coin, where t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TCSV
• Authors: Yan Chen, Beibei Wang, W. Sabrina Lin, Yongle Wu, K. J. Ray Liu
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Cooperative Streaming Problem, TCSV 2010, Unnecessary Traverse Links, Video Streaming Systems