Cheat-proof cooperation strategies for wireless live streaming social networks

Multimedia social network analysis is an emerging research area, which analyzes the behavior of users who share multimedia content and investigates the impact of human dynamics on multimedia systems. Users watching live streaming in the same wireless network share the same backbone connection to the Internet, thus they might want to cooperate with each other to obtain better video quality. These users form a wireless live-streaming social network and every user wishes to watch video with as high as possible quality while paying as less as cost for cooperation. Thus full cooperation cannot be guaranteed and the cooperation strategy must give incentives to the users. This paper proposes a game-theoretic framework to model user behavior and designs incentive-based strategies to stimulate user cooperation in wireless live streaming. We analyze the Pareto optimality and time-restricted bargaining equilibrium of the game. We also take into consideration selfish users' cheating behavior and propose cheat-proof strategies. Both our analytical and simulation results show that the proposed strategies can effectively stimulate user cooperation, achieve cheat free and help provide reliable services.