iPASS: Incentivized Peer-Assisted System for Asynchronous Streaming

Abstract

As an efficient distribution mechanism, peer-to-peer 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, we 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. To provide incentives for peer uploading, iPASS employs a differentiated pre-fetching design that enables peers with higher contribution pre-fetch content at higher speed. Through packet-level simulations, it was demonstrated that iPASS can effectively offload server and the proposed distributed incentive algorithm motivates peers to contribute and collectively achieve a high level of of QoE.