Smart Media Pricing (SMP): Non-uniform packet pricing game for wireless multimedia communications

Service Providers (SPs) typically set data price according to flat rate, the time or the usage. However, the importance of multimedia content is different among various packets, and such diversity has largely been ignored in the past. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally new framework named Smart Media Pricing (SMP), to allocate price according to multimedia packet importance in terms of distortion reduction. Specifically, we investigate the profit maximization problem of a network SP (selling video transmission service) and a client device (requesting video sequences). The transmission power and the packet price are allocated non-uniformly among video frames. By deriving game equilibrium, the SP and the client device both can achieve maximum utilities. Simulation results show that the video quality, the energy efficiency, and the social profit are improved significantly compared to traditional uniform data pricing.