Coalition-Based Resource Negotiation for Multimedia Applications in Informationally Decentralized Networks

Designing efficient and fair solutions for dividing the network resources in a distributed manner among self-interested multimedia users is recently becoming an important research topic because heterogeneous and high bandwidth multimedia applications (users), having different quality-of-service requirements, are sharing the same network. Suitable resource negotiation solutions need to explicitly consider the amount of information exchanged among the users and the computational complexity incurred by the users. In this paper, we propose decentralized solutions for resource negotiation, where multiple autonomous users self-organize into a coalition which shares the same network resources and negotiate the division of these resources by exchanging information about their requirements. We then discuss various resource sharing strategies that the users can deploy based on their exchanged information. Several of these strategies are designed to explicitly consider the utility (i.e., video quality) impact of multimedia applications. In order to quantify the utility benefit derived by exchanging different information, we define a new metric, which we refer to as the value of information. We quantify through simulations the improvements that can be achieved when various information is exchanged between users, and discuss the required complexity at the user side involved in implementing the various resource negotiation strategies.