Impact of user selfishness in construction action on the streaming quality of overlay multicast

A majority of the existing overlay multicast proposals have assumed that the nodes (users) are cooperative and thus focus on the global topology enhancement. However, a unique and important characteristic of overlay nodes is that, as application-layer agents, they can be selfish with their own interests. To achieve higher Quality-of-Service (QoS) in the streaming application, an overlay node can behave selfishly in the neighborhood information collection stage or in the construction action stage. While the former has recently been widely investigated, the impact of selfishness in the construction action remains unclear.In this paper, we present the systematic study on the impact of user selfishness during construction action on the streaming quality of overlay multicast, in both tree and mesh based structures. Our investigation considers multiple QoS measures, including stream latency, resolution, and continuity. Our contribution is twofold. First, we discuss the construction-action policy a selfish overlay node chooses to improve its individual multi-metric QoS. Second, we demonstrate according to our model, that the selfishness-aware policy in the construction action is consistent with the cooperative policy required by overlay multicast protocols to improve the QoS of the global multicast session. The implication is that we can leverage the user selfishness in the construction-action stage to form a desirable overlay topology.