Incentivized Peer-Assisted Streaming for On-Demand Services

As an efficient distribution mechanism, Peer-To-Peer (P2P) technology has become a tremendously attractive solution to offload servers in large-scale video streaming applications. However, in providing on-demand asynchronous streaming services, P2P streaming design faces two major challenges: how to schedule efficient video sharing between peers with asynchronous playback progresses? How to provide incentives for peers to contribute their resources to achieve a high level of system-wide Quality-of-Experience (QoE)? In this paper, the authors present iPASS, a novel mesh-based P2P VoD system, to address these challenges. Specifically, iPASS adopts a dynamic buffering-progress-based peering strategy to achieve high peer bandwidth utilization with low system maintenance cost.