Profit-Driven Cache Delegation: A Game-Theoretic Wireless Multimedia Offloading Solution

With increasing number of mobile users, leveraging economics in communications has been envisioned as a new paradigm to boost the network performance. However, the issues such as incentivizing offloading devices and improving end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) are still open challenges. The philosophy of the proposed algorithmic protocol lies in encouraging end-users to scavenge multimedia data from the neighbors (offloading users), and by doing so, maximize their QoE by taking advantage of shorter communication distance. The protocol also facilitates the wireless carriers to lower the network traffic congestion and to improve profits by setting up cache delegation communication among the offloading users and end-user for a nominal commission fee. Steadiness of the proposed game theoretic algorithmic protocol has been achieved by formulating the interaction between the service provider, offloading user and the end-user as a game. An algorithm has been developed to determine the Nash Equilibrium solution of the game which maximizes the utilities of all the parties. Simulation studies conducted using H.265 encoded multimedia data indicate a significance raise in end-user QoE and decrease in network congestion.