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Summary: Contracts: Practical Contribution Incentives for P2P Live Streaming
Michael Piatek Arvind Krishnamurthy Arun Venkataramani
Richard Yang David Zhang× Alexander Jaffe
Abstract
PPLive is a popular P2P video system used daily by mil-
lions of people worldwide. Achieving this level of scala-
bility depends on users making contributions to the sys-
tem, but currently, these contributions are neither verified
nor rewarded. In this paper, we describe the design and
implementation of Contracts, a new, practical approach
to providing contribution incentives in P2P live stream-
ing systems. Using measurements of tens of thousands
of PPLive users, we show that widely-used bilateral in-
centive strategies cannot be effectively applied to the live
streaming environment. Contracts adopts a different ap-
proach: rewarding globally effective contribution with
improved robustness. Using a modified PPLive client,
we show that Contracts both improves performance and
strengthens contribution incentives. For example, in our
experiments, the fraction of PPLive clients using Con-
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