Stackelberg Game for Bandwidth Allocation in Cloud-Based Wireless Live-Streaming Social Networks

Multimedia social networks have been introduced as a new technology to enrich people´s lives through enhanced multimedia distribution. On the other hand, a media cloud system can perform multimedia processing and storage, and provide heterogeneous multimedia services. However, the challenges still remain for end users (e.g., mobile devices and PCs) to receive multimedia streaming from the cloud system with satisfied quality-of-service (QoS). To address these challenges, an efficient multimedia distribution approach taking advantage of live-streaming social networks is innovated in this paper to deliver the media services from the cloud to both desktop and wireless end users. Our approach allows bandwidth limited mobile users to acquire live multimedia streaming from desktop users, directly based on their social relationships rather than from the cloud. When a number of mobile users compete for limited bandwidth access with the desktop users, a bandwidth allocation problem must be solved to meet all users´ QoS requirements in the live-streaming social network. We formulate the problem as a two-stage Stackelberg game, in which both desktop users and mobile users target at maximizing their utilities. In our study, a noncooperative game is used to model the competition among the desktop users in terms of shared bandwidth and price in the first stage of the game. The second stage of the game models the behavior of a mobile user selecting the desktop users by an evolutionary game. In addition, a case study is conducted following the general Stackelberg game formulation, where the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium is proved. Based on our game modeling, we design protocols for both desktop and mobile users and evaluate them with numerical examples.