Incentive Mechanism Design for Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a credit-based incentive mechanism for heterogeneous P2P networks, using a Stackelberg game to optimize resource allocation, promote cooperation, and address free-riding among selfish peers.

Contribution

It proposes a novel incentive scheme with differentiated service and a Stackelberg game model considering peer heterogeneity and selfish behavior.

Findings

Effective in promoting peer cooperation

Provides service differentiation based on credits

Enhances resource allocation efficiency

Abstract

With high scalability, high video streaming quality, and low bandwidth requirement, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become a popular way to exchange files and deliver multimedia content over the internet. However, current P2P systems are suffering from "free-riding" due to the peers' selfish nature. In this paper, we propose a credit-based incentive mechanism to encourage peers to cooperate with each other in a heterogeneous network consisting of wired and wireless peers. The proposed mechanism can provide differentiated service to peers with different credits through biased resource allocation. A Stackelberg game is formulated to obtain the optimal pricing and purchasing strategies, which can jointly maximize the revenue of the uploader and the utilities of the downloaders. In particular, peers' heterogeneity and selfish nature are taken into consideration when designing the utility functions for the Stackelberg game. It is shown that the proposed resource allocation scheme is effective in providing service differentiation for peers and stimulating them to make contribution to the P2P streaming system.