Fairness-Guaranteed Transcoding Task Assignment for Viewer-Assisted Crowdsourced Livecast Services

Recent years have witnessed an outstanding increase in popularity of Crowdsourced Livecast Services (CLS), which is the latest trend in social media. In CLS, transcoding enormous video contents from massive broadcasters and providing high-quality CLS for global viewers with heterogeneous devices are computation-intensive as well as time-consuming. There are some schemes that design viewer-assisted transcoding scheme, but it is challenging to achieve an efficient and fair task assignment due to the dynamic of computing and communication resources. This paper introduces a viewer-assisted CLS framework and focuses on proposing an innovative fairness-guaranteed task assignment scheme, which is a key challenge in this context. Considering the dynamic nature of viewers’ computing and communication resources and stability, a dynamic programming problem with fairness and QoS constraints is formulated. To solve the problem, we devise a Fair Bandit (FB) algorithm based on the Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB). Finally, the effectiveness of proposed scheme is demonstrated by trace-driven simulations.