69,198 research outputs found
Differential Games of Competition in Online Content Diffusion
Access to online contents represents a large share of the Internet traffic.
Most such contents are multimedia items which are user-generated, i.e., posted
online by the contents' owners. In this paper we focus on how those who provide
contents can leverage online platforms in order to profit from their large base
of potential viewers.
Actually, platforms like Vimeo or YouTube provide tools to accelerate the
dissemination of contents, i.e., recommendation lists and other re-ranking
mechanisms. Hence, the popularity of a content can be increased by paying a
cost for advertisement: doing so, it will appear with some priority in the
recommendation lists and will be accessed more frequently by the platform
users.
Ultimately, such acceleration mechanism engenders a competition among online
contents to gain popularity. In this context, our focus is on the structure of
the acceleration strategies which a content provider should use in order to
optimally promote a content given a certain daily budget. Such a best response
indeed depends on the strategies adopted by competing content providers. Also,
it is a function of the potential popularity of a content and the fee paid for
the platform advertisement service.
We formulate the problem as a differential game and we solve it for the
infinite horizon case by deriving the structure of certain Nash equilibria of
the game
Breaking the Economic Barrier of Caching in Cellular Networks: Incentives and Contracts
In this paper, a novel approach for providing incentives for caching in small
cell networks (SCNs) is proposed based on the economics framework of contract
theory. In this model, a mobile network operator (MNO) designs contracts that
will be offered to a number of content providers (CPs) to motivate them to
cache their content at the MNO's small base stations (SBSs). A practical model
in which information about the traffic generated by the CPs' users is not known
to the MNO is considered. Under such asymmetric information, the incentive
contract between the MNO and each CP is properly designed so as to determine
the amount of allocated storage to the CP and the charged price by the MNO. The
contracts are derived by the MNO in a way to maximize the global benefit of the
CPs and prevent them from using their private information to manipulate the
outcome of the caching process. For this interdependent contract model, the
closed-form expressions of the price and the allocated storage space to each CP
are derived. This proposed mechanism is shown to satisfy the sufficient and
necessary conditions for the feasibility of a contract. Moreover, it is shown
that the proposed pricing model is budget balanced, enabling the MNO to cover
all the caching expenses via the prices charged to the CPs. Simulation results
show that none of the CPs will have an incentive to choose a contract designed
for CPs with different traffic loads.Comment: Accepted for publication at Globecom 201
Crowdsourced Live Streaming over the Cloud
Empowered by today's rich tools for media generation and distribution, and
the convenient Internet access, crowdsourced streaming generalizes the
single-source streaming paradigm by including massive contributors for a video
channel. It calls a joint optimization along the path from crowdsourcers,
through streaming servers, to the end-users to minimize the overall latency.
The dynamics of the video sources, together with the globalized request demands
and the high computation demand from each sourcer, make crowdsourced live
streaming challenging even with powerful support from modern cloud computing.
In this paper, we present a generic framework that facilitates a cost-effective
cloud service for crowdsourced live streaming. Through adaptively leasing, the
cloud servers can be provisioned in a fine granularity to accommodate
geo-distributed video crowdsourcers. We present an optimal solution to deal
with service migration among cloud instances of diverse lease prices. It also
addresses the location impact to the streaming quality. To understand the
performance of the proposed strategies in the realworld, we have built a
prototype system running over the planetlab and the Amazon/Microsoft Cloud. Our
extensive experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness of our solution in
terms of deployment cost and streaming quality
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