A Game-Theoretic Approach to Cooperative Content Discovery in Mobile Networks

Conceivably, the ubiquity and ease-of-access of future wireless networks will encourage users to share the content they own and look for contents that match their interests. Peer-to-peer systems can be used in conjunction with cellular networks to download (e.g., from the Internet) the data items of interest. However, relying exclusively upon them, novel applications such as mobile multimedia are likely to overload the wireless network. We therefore consider a content discovery overlay network, based on a novel match-making paradigm. It includes (i) mobile user nodes, named Agents, which may request contents of their interest and make information and services available to other users, and (ii) infrastructure nodes, named Brokers, which assist Agents in the content discovery process. The set of a Broker and the Agents interacting with it is called colony.