Incentive-Driven Content Distribution in Wireless Multimedia Service Networks

With the multi-fold development in communication technology, there has been a rapid growth in consumption of multimedia services using mobile devices. In particular, lots of research has been done to provide multimedia services using a 3G/WLAN dual mode to mobile device users. All users download contents from content providers through cellular networks and can share their contents with their neighbors. This may lead to a situation where the cost of receiving multimedia contents is reduced owing to contents sharing. In other words, users effectively reduce the cost of receiving contents as they share some contents with neighbors. However, we believe that selfish users (or users with limited resources) are not willing to cooperate or share their contents with other users. In this paper, we propose an incentive scheme that gives the benefit of contents sharing to users in a 3G/WLAN dual mode supporting network. There are two types of users; premium users and ordinary users. Premium users can get high quality contents at the expense of spending their own money and resources of power and bandwidth, while ordinary users receive plain quality contents freely or with paying little amount of money. Our incentive mechanism designs the content provider to offer each premium user a discounted price for downloading high quality contents. Through our approach, each premium user will receive some incentive of a discounted price for receiving high quality contents in proportion to the contribution to the content provider. By doing so, the content provider can increase its total utility too. Our simulation results confirm that our proposed incentive scheme performs well.