Wireless Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming: Incentives and Resource Management Issues

Abstract

The widespread deployment of competing wireless technologies has created new research opportunities. In particular, the authors consider media streaming in hybrid wireless networks where each mobile device is equipped with two wireless network interfaces: server interface and peer interface. The server interface connects wireless clients to the server while the peer interface allows neighboring clients to communicate with one another. The two interfaces have different energy characteristics. In this chapter, the authors first give a brief account of P2P media streaming in wireless operating environments. They then survey and analyze the current state-of-the-art in tackling the security and performance issues in P2P media streaming systems. In view of the deficiencies of the existing approaches, they introduce new approaches based on game theoretic concepts. Specifically, the authors propose two collaborating relationships in which neighboring clients utilize both interfaces to share the energy cost of retrieving media content from the server. Their results show that the proposed relationships improve the streaming performance of peers without violating their energy consumption constraints. Moreover, both relationships are stable when clients neither unilaterally deviate nor voluntarily leave as a group.