Sustaining Ad-driven P2P streaming ecosystems: A market-based approach

Inconsistent quality of service is a significant problem in P2P-based video streaming systems. Pauses in playback are common for low capacity peers as they often upload relatively little compared to high capacity peers, and thus suffer from the ‘lack of reciprocity’ problem. In this work, we propose an Ad-driven Streaming P2p ECosysTem (ASPECT) that aims to eliminate the problem of playback pauses by adopting ‘reduced advertisement viewing duration’ as a positive incentive for peers to provide high upload rates. ASPECT rewards high capacity peers by reducing their advertisement viewing duration, when they provide more opportunities for lower capacity peers to download data. We build our research problem on a utility-theoretic market-based model, where the market stakeholders consist of a content provider, an advertisement provider, and network peers. Using concepts from game theory, we determine the system parameters to reach market efficiency, and study the practical implications of equilibria on the satisfaction of stakeholders' interests. From a system design perspective, one of our primary goals is to compute the equilibria advertisement viewing durations, that offer sufficient incentives for network peers to continue contributing. We evaluate ASPECT through an extensive simulation-based study. The results demonstrate that ASPECT mitigates the ‘playback pause’ problem for peers by at least 80% compared to existing approaches, results in appropriate advertisement viewing durations for all peers based on their contributions, and at the same time generates sufficient profit for the advertiser to be part of the market.