A Controlled Coalitional Game for Wireless Connection Sharing and Bandwidth Allocation in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks have been introduced as a new efficient (i.e., minimize resource usage) and effective (i.e., maximize the number of target recipients) way to disseminate content and information to a particular group of mobile users sharing the same interests. In this paper, we investigate how the content providers and the network operator can interact to distribute content in a mobile social network. The objective of each content provider is to minimize the cost pertaining to the time used for distributing the content to all subscribed mobile users as well as the cost due to the price paid to network operator for transferring the content over a wireless connection via a base station. While the content providers can cooperate by establishing coalitions for sharing a wireless connection, the network operator can control the amount of bandwidth of the wireless connection. We introduce a novel coalitional game model, referred to as ``controlled coalitional game'', to investigate the decision makings of the content providers and the network operator. The numerical studies show that, given the allocated bandwidth from network operator, the content providers can self-organize into coalitions while minimizing their individual cost for wireless connection sharing. Also, the results demonstrate that the revenue of the network operator can be maximized when the bandwidth allocation is performed considering the coalitional structure of the content providers.