Incentivizing Sharing in Realtime D2D Streaming Networks: A Mean Field Game Perspective

Abstract

We consider the problem of streaming live content to a cluster of co-located wireless devices that have both an expensive unicast base-station-to-device (B2D) interface, as well as an inexpensive broadcast device-to-device (D2D) interface, which can be used simultaneously. Our setting is a streaming system that uses a block-by-block random linear coding approach to achieve a target percentage of on-time deliveries with minimal B2D usage. Our goal is to design an incentive framework that would promote such cooperation across devices, while ensuring good quality of service. Based on the ideas drawn from truthtelling auctions, we design a mechanism that achieves this goal via appropriate transfers (monetary payments or rebates) in a setting with a large number of devices, and with peer arrivals and departures. Here, we show that a mean field game can be used to accurately approximate our system. Furthermore, the complexity of calculating the best responses under this regime is low. We implement the proposed system on an Android testbed, and illustrate its efficient performance using real world experiments.

Smart decision for device selection in D2D‐assisted multi‐path video transmission network

“…Yan et al (2018) studied how to improve the quality of real‐time scalable video services by efficiently scheduling coding aided collaborative transmissions in D2D communications. Li et al (2017) designed an incentive framework based on truth‐telling auctions that would promote cooperation across devices, while ensuring good quality of service in hybrid D2D network. Ye et al (2018) considered the power control and mode selection of streaming VBR videos in D2D wireless networks.…”

Network Coding in Relay-Based Device-to-Device Communications

“…In Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), a relay node encodes the packets by randomly choosing some coefficients from a finite mathematical field, and then transmits the encoded packets and the encoding coefficients to receivers [12]. Typically, if a relay node needs to encode n packets, then it will choose an N × n (with N > n ) coefficient matrix over a finite field, and multiply this matrix with the vector of the n packets to produce N encoded packets.…”

Pareto-Improving Incentive Mechanism for Noncooperative Dynamical Systems Under Sustainable Budget Constraint

“…Rieh et al [35] investigated efficient incentive-based control algorithms for heterogeneous decision markers in repeated matrix games with a budget constraint and revealed the transitional behavior of the network games under the provided payoff incentives. Fotakis and Spirakis [36] considered cost-balancing tolls (also known as taxes or prices) for atomic network congestion games where the tolls paid inside the transportation network are feasibly refunded to the agents and hence those tolls do not influence the social costs, whereas Li et al [37] designed a budget-balancing incentive framework promoting cooperation across devices in broadcast device-to-device systems. The balanced budget constraints in those works are called strong budget-balance in mechanism design problems, which requires lossless monetary transfer and may be hard to be simultaneously achieved with perfect efficiency [38].…”