Design Space of Online Bandwidth Trading Markets for P2P Streaming Systems

Abstract

With substantial increase in the connection speed of Internet users and growing demand for high-quality video streaming services, provision of enough resources in P2P streaming systems to guarantee high streaming rate becomes a challenging task. The current works for the deployment of helper peers as bandwidth boosters in the P2P streaming systems does not model dynamic resource trading inside the system and lack incentive mechanisms to guarantee helpers' participation. The continuous join/leave of peers in different video channels, time constraints on their duration of stay in the system, and limited information about the internal benefits and costs of peers make the conventional static, offline mechanism design schemes impractical. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of deployment of a online bandwidth trading platform designed for P2P streaming and explore the different design options that are specific to these systems. A new two-sided bandwidth market among peers and helpers is also formulated and an online truthful auction mechanism is proposed which results in higher social welfare compared to the offline algorithms.