NeTS: EAGER: Exploring Smart Media Pricing In QoE-Driven Network Economics To Revitalize Wireless Multimedia Resource Allocation

San Diego State University Foundation, San Diego CA

Investigators

Abstract

The global internet traffic is aggressively increasing at an enormous rate, posing significant challenges to modern network protocol design. In addition, multimedia has become the "biggest big data" running through the last mile of wireless access networks, such as video on demand, cloud-based video games, and social media video sharing. This project explores potential solutions to support such big volumes of multimedia traffic over resource-constrained wireless access networks. In particular, this project investigates new approaches to improve quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia users by employing high level economic theories, orchestrating low level communication resources, and exploring selfish user behaviors among neighboring devices. The goal of this project is to test the hypothesis that the wireless big data multimedia communication challenge could be partially solved by leveraging a new concept of smart media pricing to transform the wireless resource allocation from rate-distortion fashion to price-distortion fashion. This project pursues two coherent thrusts beyond traditional resource allocation: (1) creating a non-uniform quality-driven smart multimedia pricing model to assign different prices to multimedia packet groups with different quality contributions and decoding influences, and thus leveraging price as a new dimension in resource allocation; (2) designing a profit-driven cache delegation protocol to improve multimedia quality through offloading, and thus encouraging users to scavenge recently cached media contents from neighboring devices. The models, algorithms and protocols developed through this project could possibly identify new frontiers of pricing policy design in wireless multimedia resource allocation research. Research findings will be integrated to education curriculum and student advising, to broaden students' future career potentials and contribute to the U.S. workforce preparation.