Modeling of Free Riders in P2P Live Streaming Systems

In these days, a large amount of popular peer-to-peer (also commonly known as P2P) applications, especially in the live streaming domain, are operating in Internet. One of the keys to success of such an application is the mutual cooperation among the participants (i.e., peers) in that application. However, presence of selfish peers (also commonly known as free riders) affects the performance of the P2P live streaming systems. In this work, we investigate the effect of the presence of free riders on the performance of the P2P live streaming systems. Here, we developed a discrete-time stochastic model and then compare the continuous playback performances of the system assuming different amount of free riders in the system. Our results show that the presence of free riders adversely affects the over all performance of a P2P live streaming system.