Cooperation Among Members of Online Communities: Profitable Mechanisms to Better Distribute Near-Real-Time Services

Today some of the most popular and successful applications over the Internet are based on Peer-to-Peer P2P solutions. Online Social Networks OSN represent a stunning phenomenon too, involving communities of unprecedented size, whose members organize their relationships on the basis of social or professional friendship. This work deals with a P2P video streaming platform and focuses on the performance improvements that can be granted to those P2P nodes that are also members of a social network. The underpinning idea is that OSN friends and friends of friends might be more willing to help their mates than complete strangers in fetching the desired content within the P2P overlay. Hence, an approach is devised to guarantee that P2P users belonging to an OSN are guaranteed a better service when critical conditions build up, i.e., when bandwidth availability is scarce. Different help strategies are proposed, and their improvements are numerically assessed, showing that the help of direct friends, two-hops away friends and, in the limit, of the entire OSN community brings in considerable advantages. The obtained results demonstrate that the amount of delivered video increases and the delay notably decreases, for those privileged peers that leverage their OSN membership within the P2P overlay.