Key agreement for collaborative groups has become an increasingly popular research area. However, most of previous work requires each member to not only maintain the whole key tree structure whose size is O(N), where N is the size of group, but also involve rekeying operation upon each membership change, resulting in high costs in terms of storage, communication and computation and thus suffers from poor scalability. In this paper, we propose a scalable Distributed and collaborative group key agreement scheme using a Virtual Key Tree (D-VKT). Each group member in D-VKT only reserves and maintains partial information of the whole key tree structure with requirement of O(log N). Furthermore, a distributed tree balancing algorithm is presented to keep the whole key tree as balanced as possible for rekeying efficiency. In addition, a distributed group batch rekeying protocol is proposed to further reduce the computation and communication workload of group rekeying in a highly dynamic environment. The experiment results demonstrate that D-VKT can scale to large and dynamic collaborative groups.

During recent years, there has been a rapid growth in deployment of gossip-based protocol in many multicast applications. In a typical gossip-based protocol, each node acts as dual roles of receiver and sender, independently exchanging data with its neighbors to facilitate scalability and resilience. However, most of previous work in this literature seldom considered cheating issue of end users, which is also very important in face of the fact that the mutual cooperation inherently determines overall system performance. In this paper, we investigate the dishonest behaviors in decentralized gossip-based protocol through extensive experimental study. Our original contributions come in two-fold: In the first part of cheating study, we analytically discuss two typical cheating strategies, that is, intentionally increasing subscription requests and untruthfully calculating forwarding probability, and further evaluate their negative impacts. The results indicate that more attention should be paid to defending cheating behaviors in gossip-based protocol. In the second part of anti-cheating study, we propose a receiver-driven measurement mechanism, which evaluates individual forwarding traffic from the perspective of receivers and thus identifies cheating nodes with high incoming/outgoing ratio. Furthermore, we extend our mechanism by introducing reliable factor to further improve its accuracy. The experiments under various conditions show that it performs quite well in case of serious cheating and achieves considerable performance in other cases.

In recent years, the inherent effectiveness of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks has been advocated to address scalability issues in large scale Internet-based on-Demand streaming services. Most of existing works adopt Cache-and-Relay (CR) scheme to exploit a cooperative paradigm among peers. In this paper, we mainly present our practical evaluation study of the scalability of the CR scheme by taking into account of more than 20,000,000 collected real traces. Based on trace-driven simulations, we conclude that the CR scheme is not as effective as previously reported in terms of saving server bandwidth.