Profit Improvement in Wireless Video Broadcasting System: A Marginal Principle Approach

In this paper, we address the problem of how to make the wireless service provider have better profits with consideration of user experience provision in wireless video broadcasting systems. We propose a marginal-based pricing and a resource-allocation framework to achieve better resource utilization and profit improvement. The marginal principle includes 1) marginal user principle, in which a pricing mechanism is established on the basis of marginal users, such that the WSP can seek its own maximum profit of each content with a QoE guarantee; 2) marginal profit principle, in which a WSP can earn the maximum profit through multicontent-service provision by regulating rate allocation in limited available bandwidth. Furthermore, we present a two-tier framework consisting of the inner and outer loops. The inner loop focuses on pricing-based service provision based on the notion of marginal user principle. The outer loop concentrates on allocating bandwidth among multiple video contents according to marginal profit principle. For the solution, we model the profit regions of WSPs and end-users as the polymatroid structures and model the corresponding allocated rate regions as the contra-polymatroid structures. Through exploiting the properties of polymatroid and contra-polymatroid structures, the broadcasting profit problem is solved by finding the optimal rate vector on the sum-rate facet which satisfies the maximal achievable profit. Extensive performance comparison and analysis are presented to demonstrate efficiency of the proposed solution.