A game-theoretic framework for multi-user multimedia rate allocation

How to efficiently and fairly allocate data rate among different users is a key problem in the field of multiuser multimedia communication. However, most of the existing optimization-based methods, such as minimizing the weighted sum of the distortions or maximizing the weighted sum of the PSNRs, have their weights heuristically determined. Moreover, those approaches mainly focus on the efficiency issue while ignoring the fairness issue. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a game-theoretic framework, in which the utility/payoff function of each user/player is jointly determined by the characteristic of the transmitted video sequence and the allocated bitrate. We show that with the proportional fairness criterion, the game has a unique Nash equilibrium, according to which the controller can efficiently and fairly allocate the available network bandwidth to the users. Finally, we show several experimental results on real video data to verify the proposed method.