A Business Model for Multimedia Streaming in Mobile Clouds

In the last few years, the proliferation of mobile devices coupled with the ever-increasing popularity of multimedia applications, has stimulated great interest of new figures of service providers. The major objective is to offer mobile users, located in limited areas, with broadband multimedia applications enriched with services and functionalities specific to mobile scenarios. This is the case, for example, of passengers waiting to board in an airport, visitors to a museum, or spectators at a football stadium. Since cellular networks usually cannot deliver bitrates suitable for such kinds of applications to every single user, the most appealing solution for providing mobile users with multimedia applications is to organize users into mobile clouds. In this context, this paper considers delay-constrained multimedia streaming applications over mobile clouds, and defines a business model for managing these kinds of services. Users are divided into two classes, according to the way they intend to pay for the service: in bandwidth and energy for traffic relaying (cheap-tariff) or with some money (full-tariff). An analytical model is proposed for designing the main system parameters and deciding on the tariffs of the business model. Finally, the business model is applied to a case study.