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

In recent years, classical Internet applications have been accompanied by the surging of a greatvariety of new services and exciting possibilities. Among such broad range, two particular phenomenaare highly successful: Online Social Networks (OSNs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) services.This paper merges these distinct worlds, via the proposal of a P2P streaming system that takesadvantage of the friendship relationships of an underlying OSN, to better distribute videos among theoverlay peers that are also friends within the OSN. A category of privileged users is therefore created,that is guaranteed a satisfying viewing experience when the P2P overlay operates in critical conditions,i.e, when bandwidth availability is scarce. We show that the help of direct friends, two-hops awayfriends and, in the limit, of the entire OSN community brings in considerable advantages to the peersthat are OSN members. In particular:- the number of those among them that are able to download the entire video significantly increases;- the number of video portions they can obtain consistently raises;- as desired, when the P2P system is operating in underloaded conditions, a proper functioning isguaranteed to all of its nodes, regardless of their being members of the OSN or plain P2P users.