A fair cooperative content-sharing service
Wireless cooperative content sharing, based on the synergistic use of cellular and short-range technologies, has recently gained much interest from academic and industrial communities. Besides energy saving and information transfer delay reduction, this paradigm can enable a significant reduction in cellular bandwidth usage, which also means monetary saving for users. In fact, such a cooperation is usually opposed by network and service providers, because it strongly reduces their potential profits. This paper deals with the provider perspective, too. In particular, a mediated cooperative behavior is proposed and analyzed within a scenario of short-range wireless file-sharing. The basic idea is that providers offer the possibility to users of cooperatively downloading contents, and increase their own profits because more users are attracted by such a service. Indeed, by participating in the devised service, users both avoid a (possibly expensive) stand-alone download of the desired product, and benefit of a special group-discount. The costs (and download tasks) distribution among users is based on a cooperative game theoretic model. Indeed, suitable solution concepts are applied to provide a fair solution, acceptable by all users, and hence to overcome the limitation of traditional optimization approaches to costs (and tasks) distribution.
fairness wireless cooperation content sharing nucleolus game theory mediated p2p process