Law Is Order: Protecting Multimedia Network Transmission by Game Theory and Mechanism Design

Nowadays, the computer network plays as the most important medium in the transmitting of multimedia. Correspondingly, the orderliness of network is the protection of multimedia transmission. However, due to the Packet Switching design, the network can only provide best-effort service, in which the multimedia applications compete for its network resource. In the lawless competition, the applications are obliged to be greedy and deceptive driven by their best self-interest. As a result, the transmission of multimedia applications becomes disorderly and inefficiently, and we lose the protection of multimedia network transmission. In this paper, we first investigate the behaviors of multimedia applications with Game Theory, and summarize the disorderly transmission as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The lost of law leads to the disorderly transmission in multimedia network. Then, we investigate the relationship between application’s media-attribute and its required transmission service, and resolve this Prisoner’s Dilemma with Mechanism Design. Specifically, a novel Media-attribute Switching (MAS) is proposed, where the network allocate the transmission resources according to the application’s claimed media-attribute. In MAS, differentiated services are provided to applications with different claimed media-attribute. We design MAS to have the honesty application gets compatible service while the deceptive application gets incompatible service. Therefore, the MAS can provide incentives for multimedia applications to label their data media-attributes honestly and allocate the network resources according to their attributes, thus to protect the multimedia network transmission. The theoretical analysis and experimental comparison both prove our MAS’s protection to the multimedia network.