Multimedia Upstreaming Cournot Game in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Internet of Things

With the rapid growth of multimedia content production from massive User Equipments (UEs) in the Internet of Things (IoTs) environment, how to ensure high Quality of Experience (QoE) for UEs in the wireless IoT upstreaming services becomes a big challenge. To address the multimedia IoT QoE challenge, a game theoretical power allocation strategy is studied in the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) wireless uplink IoT environment in this paper. Due to the natural non-cooperative relationships among UEs, we model the UEs’ power allocation problem in the upstreaming service as a Cournot competition game in an Oligopoly market model. In addition, factors such as the uploading content popularity, power constraints, and the energy cost of a UE are jointly considered when we build UE's QoE model. By deriving the concavity of UE's utility function, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium power solution for each UE. Numerical simulations are carried out by considering all the system constraints in the multiple UEs scenarios. The results show that system throughput in the NOMA scheme outperforms the conventional Orthogonal Multiple Access, and the system utility performance in the proposed game solution is better than the fixed power selection strategy.