Building a monitoring overlay for peer-to-peer streaming

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems often assume that nodes are cooperative to upload and download data. However, in the open environment of the Internet, this is not true and there exist malicious nodes in the system. In this paper, we study malicious actions that can be detected through peerbased monitoring. We require each node to monitor the data received and to periodically send out monitoring messages about its neighbors to some trustworthy nodes. To efficiently store and search the messages among multiple trustworthy nodes, we organize the trustworthy nodes into a threaded binary tree. The trustworthy nodes also dynamically redistribute the monitoring messages among them to achieve load balancing. Our simulation results show that this scheme can efficiently detect malicious nodes with high accuracy, and that the dynamic redistribution method can achieve good load balancing among the trustworthy nodes. © 2006 IEEE