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

全球互联网流量正以惊人的速度增长，对现代网络协议设计提出了重大挑战。此外，多媒体已成为贯穿无线接入网络最后一公里的“最大的大数据”，如视频点播、基于云的视频游戏、社交媒体视频分享等。这个项目探讨了在资源受限的无线接入网络上支持如此大容量的多媒体流量的潜在解决方案。特别是，该项目研究了通过采用高级经济理论，协调低级通信资源，以及探索相邻设备之间的自私用户行为。该项目的目标是测试假设，即无线大数据多媒体通信挑战可以通过利用智能媒体定价的新概念部分解决，将无线资源分配从率失真方式转换为价格失真方式。本项目在传统资源分配的基础上，提出了两个一致的目标：（1）建立一个非统一的质量驱动的智能多媒体定价模型，为具有不同质量贡献和解码影响的多媒体分组分配不同的价格，从而将价格作为资源分配的一个新维度;（2）设计一个利益驱动的缓存委托协议，通过卸载来提高多媒体质量，从而鼓励用户从相邻设备中删除最近缓存的媒体内容。本计画所发展之模型、演算法与协定，将可能为无线多媒体资源分配研究中之价格策略设计提供新的方向。研究结果将被整合到教育课程和学生咨询中，以拓宽学生未来的职业潜力，并为美国劳动力做好准备。

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.