Videocent: a quality-oriented incentive mechanism for video delivery in opportunistic networks

In recent years, more and more people begin to focus on data delivery through opportunistic contacts among mobile users. In most cases, the data that we expect to share with others are videos, such as popular music videos and funny films. Because the video delivery will consume numerous resources of devices, few people will provide such service for others without any benefit. Thus, this paper centers on the incentive mechanism design for video delivery in opportunistic networks. Although several incentive schemes for such kind of networks have been proposed, however, they all mainly focus on the encouragement of general data forwarding, and almost none of them aims to stimulate nodes to realize the performance objective of networks. In this paper, we propose Videocent, a novel quality-oriented incentive mechanism for video delivery, which takes the characteristics of video data into account and formulates the video delivery among nodes as a game. This mechanism could not only encourage nodes to participate in the video delivery but also stimulate them to follow the defined rules to optimize the video delivery quality of whole networks. Its performance is validated through extensive simulations.