Implementation of PSH Reputation Mechanism in LiveShift Application

LiveShift is a peer-to-peer video streaming application developed by the CSG group at the University of Zurich. The application, developed in Java, supports both live streaming and video-on-demand in an integrated manner. While video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in a distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner. At the moment, however, the application relies on the altruistic behavior of users in order to successfully deliver high-quality video streaming to all users. This is because users are not punished with lower-quality video if they do not forward streams to other users.

PSH is a reputation mechanism that ensures that peers that forward streams to other peers have a higher chance of receiving high-quality video streams from other peers. It is proven to perform better than tit-for-tat in scenarios similar to peer-to-peer video streaming. PSH has been developed using the Java programming language.

The goal of this thesis is to implement PSH support in the LiveShift application. Although both PSH and LiveShift are already implemented, the challenge is to successfully apply PSH in LiveShift and run evaluations to show the improvement in performance introduced by the PSH reputation mechanism.