Exploiting scheduling and free‐riding for offline downloading in BitTorrent networks

Recently, the peer‐to‐peer (P2P) architecture has become a popular scheme for Internet users to rapidly exchange files. As reported in previous studies, P2P traffic accounts for a significant portion of overall Internet traffic. Many computing resources, for example, network bandwidth and disk space, may be consumed by P2P clients. Accordingly, in this paper, we devise a novel scheme that integrates advantageous features of both the conventional client–server and the P2P architectures to create an offline downloading service. Specifically, the proposed service acts as an agent that downloads required files from the BitTorrent network without consuming local computing resources. In other words, users can stay offline during the download process. Because the proposed scheme aims to provide service to numerous users at the same time, a proper scheduling technique is adopted to achieve better download performance. Moreover, a free‐riding mechanism is seamlessly incorporated with the proposed priority queuing to facilitate more effective bandwidth utilization. Empirical studies show that our scheme is promising in practical applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GaMe‐PLive: a new game theoretic mechanism for P2P live video streaming

GaMe‐PLive is a game theoretical framework for peer‐to‐peer live video streaming. Prevention of free‐riding and minimization of loss rate in video data transmission are the important objectives of the proposed framework. GaMe‐PLive is also extremely evasive about overhead of extra control messages exchange. At first, a static game with complete information between peers is described, which models the peer's interactive decision process for acceptance/rejection of a video chunk request. All peers repeatedly play this game during video playback periodically. Afterwards, the proposed game is analyzed to obtain a Nash equilibrium, which determines a peer's best strategic response for participation in the video chunk distribution. It will be proved that by applying some simple and feasible conditions, the desired objectives can be reached. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system has been successful in detecting free‐riders with negligible false negative and false positive rate. Also, tolerable loss chunk percentage has been satisfied in all performed tests. Besides, an interesting social norm emerges in GaMe‐PLive: Less participation leads to more missing chunks. GaMe‐PLive will be proven to be quite resistant against cheating peers. The proposed framework displays high performance even if there is not a video server with high upload bandwidth. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

General switch‐and‐examine relaying for demodulate‐and‐forward cooperative diversity

Two new demodulate‐and‐forward schemes of multi‐relay cooperative diversity with switch‐and‐examine relaying (SER) are analyzed. To reduce relay usage and enhance bandwidth efficiency, the two new cooperative diversity schemes employ a switch‐based relay selection. The proposed schemes consume less communication resource than regular relaying schemes, such as the selection combining (SC) or maximal ratio combining (MRC) schemes that always use all relays, and also achieve better performance than distributed switch‐and‐stay schemes. In the first scheme, the decision statistic for relay usage and selection is based on the signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). In the second scheme, the log‐likelihood ratio (LLR) of received signals is used for the decision of relay usage and selection. With the two SER schemes, the bit error probability (BEP) of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and the average number of used paths are derived and expressed in closed‐form for the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical and simulation results are presented for performance illustrations. According to the numerical results, the LLR‐based SER not only achieves a lower BEP but also consumes less relay resource than the SNR‐based SER. Furthermore, the LLR‐based SER scheme even outperforms the corresponding SNR‐based SC scheme for a range of average SNR. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

iPTT: peer‐to‐peer push‐to‐talk for VoIP

This paper proposes iPTT, a peer‐to‐peer (P2P) Push‐to‐Talk (PTT) service for Voice over IP (VoIP). In iPTT, a distributed and mobile‐operator independent network architecture is presented to accelerate the deployment of the PTT service. Based on the serverless architecture, we develop two mechanisms, that is, flooding‐based floor control mechanism (FFC) and tree‐based floor control mechanism (TFC), for real‐time talk‐burst determination. The determination algorithms and the corresponding message flows for these two mechanisms are designed to show the feasibility of FFC and TFC. The performance of FFC and TFC is investigated through our analytical and simulation models in terms of the determination latency and the number of floor‐control message exchanges. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An amplify‐and‐forward and decode‐and‐forward mixed relay communication system and its performance analysis

A kind of amplify‐and‐forward (AF) and decode‐and‐forward (DF) mixed relay communication system is proposed in this letter. The source broadcasts the signal to all the relays. Relays that can decode the signal adopt DF scheme to retransmit the signal, while the rest adopt AF scheme for retransmission. The destination employs maximum ratio combining technique to maximize the received signal‐to‐noise ratio. Another situation concerned in this letter is that when the relay cannot decode the source signal, it may retransmit the interference signal with AF scheme. Closed‐form expressions of outage probability are derived. Simulation results show that the analytical curves agree with the simulated ones very well, and the AF‐DF mixed relay system can improve the availability of the relays. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A location‐aware peer‐to‐peer overlay network

This work describes a novel location‐aware, self‐organizing, fault‐tolerant peer‐to‐peer (P2P) overlay network, referred to as Laptop. Network locality‐aware considerations are a very important metric for designing a P2P overlay network. Several network proximity schemes have been proposed to enhance the routing efficiency of existing DHT‐based overlay networks. However, these schemes have some drawbacks such as high overlay network and routing table maintenance overhead, or not being completely self‐organizing. As a result, they may result in poor scalability as the number of nodes in the system grows. Laptop constructs a location‐aware overlay network without pre‐determined landmarks and adopts a routing cache scheme to avoid maintaining the routing table periodically. In addition, Laptop significantly reduces the overlay maintenance overhead by making each node maintain only the connectivity between parent and itself. Mathematical analysis and simulations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of Laptop. Our mathematical analysis shows that the routing path length is bounded by log_d N, and the joining and leaving overhead is bounded by d log_d N, where N is the number of nodes in the system, and d is the maximum degree of each node on the overlay tree. Our simulation results show that the average latency stretch is 1.6 and the average routing path length is only about three in 10 000 Laptop nodes, and the maximum degree of a node is bounded by 32. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A self‐adaptive algorithm for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers in cognitive mobile peer‐to‐peer networks

Cognitive peer‐to‐peer networks are obtained from a combination of cognitive networking concepts and peer‐to‐peer networks. These networks are able to improve their performance while operating under dynamic and unknown environments. A cognitive peer‐to‐peer network tries to learn an appropriate configuration for itself considering the unknown physical properties of peers. Cognitive mobile peer‐to‐peer networks refer to cognitive peer‐to‐peer networks which are built over mobile ad hoc networks. In these networks, heterogeneity of the mobility of peers and resource limitation in wireless networks create challenges for network management algorithms. Because of the dynamicity of these networks, the management algorithms should be designated in self‐adaptive manner. In one type of these networks, some peers, called super‐peers, undertake to perform network managerial tasks. The mobility of peers leads to connection failure among peers and reselection of new super‐peers. Therefore, the selection of super‐peers, due to their influential role, requires an algorithm that considers the peers' mobility. Up to now, no self‐adaptive algorithm has been designated for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers in a self‐adaptive manner. This paper proposes M‐SSBLA, a self‐adaptive algorithm for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers based on learning automata. The proposed algorithm is obtained from cooperation between a learning automata‐based cognitive engine and MIS. MIS is a well‐known super‐peer selection algorithm in mobile peer‐to‐peer networks. We compared the proposed algorithm with recently reported algorithms, especially for a network with high mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can cover maximum ordinary‐peer with a few super‐peer and improve robustness against super‐peer failures while decreasing maintenance overhead.     

Adaptive video protection in large scale peer‐to‐peer video streaming over mobile wireless mesh networks

Because video streaming over mobile handheld devices has been of great interest, the necessity of introducing new methods with low implementation cost and scalable infrastructures is a strong demand of the service. In particular, these requirements are present in popular wireless networks such as wireless mesh networks (WMN). Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks promise an efficient scalable network infrastructure for video streaming over wired and wireless networks. Limited resources of the peers in P2P networks and high error rate in wireless channels make it more challenging to run P2P streaming applications over WMNs. Therefore, it is necessary to design efficient and improved error protection methods in P2P video streaming applications over WMNs. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive unequal video protection method specially intended for large scale P2P video streaming over mobile WMNs. Using this method, different frames have different priorities in receivers along the recovery process. Moreover, we precisely and completely evaluate different aspects related to frame protection in these networks using five important performance metrics including video distortion, late arrival distortion, end‐to‐end delay, overhead and initial start‐up delay. The results obtained from a precise simulation in OMNeT++ show that the proposed adaptive method significantly outperforms other solutions by providing better video quality on mobile wireless nodes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance analysis of a variable‐gain amplify‐and‐forward relayed mixed RF‐FSO system

In this work, an amplify‐and‐forward variable‐gain relayed mixed RF‐FSO system is studied. The considered dual‐hop system consists of a radio frequency (RF) link followed by a free space optical (FSO) channel. The RF link is affected by short‐term multipath fading and long‐term shadowing effects and is assumed to follow the generalized‐K fading distribution that approximates accurately several important distributions often used to model communication channels. The FSO channel experiences fading caused by atmospheric turbulence that is modeled by the gamma‐gamma distribution characterizing moderate and strong turbulence conditions. The FSO channel also suffers path loss and pointing error induced misalignment fading. The performance of the considered system is analyzed under the collective influence of distribution shaping parameters, pointing errors that result in misalignment fading, atmospheric turbulence, and path loss. The moment‐generating function of the Signal power to noise power ratio measured end‐to‐end for this system is derived. The cumulative distribution function for the Signal power to noise power ratio present between the source and destination receiver is also evaluated. Further, we investigate the error and outage performance and the average channel capacity for this system. The analytical expressions in closed form for the outage probability, symbol and bit error rate considering different modulation schemes and channel capacity are also derived. The mathematical expressions obtained are also demonstrated by numerical plots.     

Peer‐to‐peer cooperation for GPS positioning

This paper presents a peer‐to‐peer cooperative positioning technique together with its performance assessment. The cooperation between the two GPS receivers is realized by means of a wireless LAN connection and is significantly influenced by the accurateness of the synchronization between the two terminals. Both the outdoor‐to‐indoor and outdoor‐to‐outdoor scenarios are considered. For each scenario, we assess the satellite signal acquisition and its computational load and the performance in terms of position accuracy and time‐to‐first‐fix of the positioning procedure. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Frequency resource allocation strategy with QoS support in hybrid cellular and Device‐to‐Device networks

Hybrid networks, comprising a conventional cellular network overlaid with Device‐to‐Device (D2D), offer efficient way to improve system throughput. In this paper, a novel orthogonal frequency‐division multiple access channel‐assignment method is proposed for hybrid network. The proposed approach is optimal in terms of throughput and is subjected to a sensible QoS requirement, which guarantees that macrocell and D2D achieve a prescribed data rate and outage probability, respectively. Our solution consists of two phases. In the first phase, the minimum sub‐channels are allocated to the macrocell to satisfy their data rate requirements. This problem is mapped to the 0‐1 Knapsack Problem and solved by integer programming based Lagrange dual approach. In the second phase, the redundant sub‐channels are allocated to D2D pairs to maximize the throughput of D2D networks. An interference management scheme is proposed to guarantee the outage probability of D2D communications. A cluster is taken as the unit for frequency reuse among D2D pairs. The problem of clustering is mapped to the MAX k‐CUT problem in graph theory and is solved by graph‐based heuristic algorithm. Extensive simulations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed solution compared with the existing scheme. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient actor‐critic reinforcement learning for device‐to‐device communication underlaying sectored cellular network

In this paper, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) approach with cell sectoring is proposed to solve the channel and power allocation issue for a device‐to‐device (D2D)‐enabled cellular network when the prior traffic information is not known to the base station (BS). Further, this paper explores an optimal policy for resource and power allocation between users intending to maximize the sum‐rate of the overall system. Since the behavior of wireless channel and traffic request of users in the system is stochastic in nature, the dynamic property of the environment allows us to employ an actor‐critic RL technique to learn the best policy through continuous interaction with the surrounding. The proposed work comprises of four phases: cell splitting, clustering, queuing model, and channel allocation and power allocation simultaneously using an actor‐critic RL. The implementation of cell splitting with novel clustering technique increases the network coverage, reduces co‐channel cell interference, and minimizes the transmission power of nodes, whereas the queuing model solves the issue of waiting time for users in a priority‐based data transmission. With the help of continuous state‐action space, the actor‐critic RL algorithm based on policy gradient improves the overall system sum‐rate as well as the D2D throughput. The actor adopts a parameter‐based stochastic policy for giving continuous action while the critic estimates the policy and criticizes the actor for the action. This reduces the high variance of the policy gradient. Through numerical simulations, the benefit of our resource sharing scheme over other existing traditional scheme is verified.     

Decode‐and‐forward with full‐duplex relaying

This paper addresses the full‐duplex relaying. Some expressions for outage and average capacity of a two‐hop cooperative system with a full‐duplex relay are derived under an independent but not identically distributed Rayleigh fading environment. Using these expressions, we provide the performance analysis without Monte Carlo simulations. The impact of interference between the relay output and input is investigated. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Decode‐and‐forward with partial relay selection

Exact expressions for outage probability and symbol error rate are presented for a decode‐and‐forward cooperative network with partial relay selection. An independent but not identically distributed Nakagami‐m fading environment is considered. Numerical and simulated results show the validity of the analytical results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhancing quality of experience using peer‐to‐peer overlay on device‐to‐device communications

With the recent development of LTE‐A/5G technologies, data sharing among mobile devices offer an attractive opportunity to reduce Internet access. However, it requires smart strategies to share the data with low trade‐offs in time, cost, and energy. Several existing schemes offer a super‐peer‐based two‐tier model using a distributed hash table (DHT) organization for smart devices having device‐to‐device (D2D)/Bluetooth/WiFi capabilities. The primary focus of these schemes has been to reduce Internet usage by increased D2D content sharing. However, the real challenge is not in creating a two‐tier model, but evolving an efficient overlay that offers enhanced opportunities for D2D content sharing over the existing model. In this paper, we formulated a P‐median‐based selection of tier‐1 devices in a distribution network and solved it using the Lagrangian relaxation method. The tier‐2 devices become clients seeking content sharing services from tier‐1 devices. A strong motivation in this work is to raise a user's perception of the grade of service known as quality of experience (QoE). We analyzed the challenge for QoE assessment in resource‐constrained smartphones under the proposed model of enhanced D2D communication. Our focus is to establish a framework to evaluate QoE for applications and services over LTE‐A/5G networks with an improved D2D communication level. The simulation and the experimental results validate the claim that substantial improvements in QoE are possible with the proposed mathematical model for selecting and placing tier‐1 mobile devices and maintaining a DHT for D2D communication.     

A survey and comparison on overlay‐underlay mapping techniques in peer‐to‐peer overlay networks

Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) overlay networks were developed initially for file sharing such as Napster and Gnutella; but later, they have become popular for content sharing, media streaming, telephony applications, etc. Underlay‐unawareness in P2P systems can result in suboptimal peer selection for overlay routing and hence poor performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the research work carried out to solve the overlay‐underlay mapping problems up till now. The majority of underlay‐aware proposals for peer selection focus on finding the shortest overlay routes by selecting nearest nodes according to proximity information. Another class of approaches is based on passive or active probing for provision of underlay information to P2P applications. Some other optimizations propose use of P2P middleware to extract, process, and refine underlay information and provide it to P2P overlay applications. Another class of approaches strive to use ISPs or third parties to provide underlay information to P2P overlay applications according to their requirements. We have made a state‐of‐the‐art review and comparison for addressing the overlay‐underlay mismatch in terms of their operation, merits, limitations, and future directions.     

Nearly optimal linear transceiver design for amplify‐and‐forward MIMO multiple‐relay systems under MMSE criterion

In this paper, we consider amplify‐and‐forward multiple‐input multiple‐output multiple‐relay systems, where all the nodes have multiple antennas. For enhancing link reliability, we address the problem of designing optimal linear transceiver to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of symbol estimations subject to the total relay transmit power constraint. This problem is highly complex and has not been solved in the literature. We first simplify this optimization problem to one that takes a singular value vector and a unitary matrix as optimization variables. Then based on the analyses for the simplified problem, we develop an iterative algorithm consisting of one boundary optimization and one unitary matrix constrained optimization. We show analytically that the proposed iterative algorithm always converges, and the MSE is monotonically decreasing from one iteration to the next. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the nearly optimal performance of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A distributed adaptive landmark clustering algorithm based on mOverlay and learning automata for topology mismatch problem in unstructured peer‐to‐peer networks

Peer‐to‐peer networks are overlay networks that are built on top of communication networks that are called underlay networks. In these networks, peers are unaware of the underlying networks, so the peers choose their neighbors without considering the underlay positions, and therefore, the resultant overlay network may have mismatches with its underlying network, causing redundant end‐to‐end delay. Landmark clustering algorithms, such as mOverlay , are used to solve topology mismatch problem. In the mOverlay algorithm, the overlay network is formed by clusters in which each cluster has a landmark peer. One of the drawbacks of mOverlay is that the selected landmark peer for each cluster is fixed during the operation of the network. Because of the dynamic nature of peer‐to‐peer networks, using a non‐adaptive landmark selection algorithm may not be appropriate. In this paper, an adaptive landmark clustering algorithm obtained from the combination of mOverlay and learning automata is proposed. Learning automata are used to adaptively select appropriate landmark peers for the clusters in such a way that the total communication delay will be minimized. Simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms with respect to communication delay and average round‐trip time between peers within clusters. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Double‐layer P2P networks supporting semantic search and keeping scalability

In peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks, with the aim to support semantic search and keep scalability at the same time, a novel double‐layer P2P protocol is proposed. Firstly, keywords representing resource characteristics are compressed into bloom filters and structured P2P layer is constructed. Secondly, through analyzing one's bloom filters, each node extracts its interest, which is represented by a characteristic vector V. After obtaining common interest among nodes through comparing their Vs, a small‐world model is constructed, and another unstructured P2P layer is obtained. Consequently, on the basis of the decentralized architecture, a double‐layer semantic search P2P protocol is structured. When objective resource is being located, its similarity to local interest is used to determine whether it should be located in unstructured P2P semantic layer or structured layer adaptively, which not only improves search efficiency but also supports semantic location more widely. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.