One-to-Many Multi-agent Negotiation and Coordination Mechanisms to Manage User Satisfaction

Quality of Experience (QoE) is defined as the measure of end-user satisfaction with the service. Existing works addressing QoE-management rely on a binary vision of end-user satisfaction. This vision has been criticized by the growing empirical evidence showing that QoE is rather a degree. The aim of this article is to go beyond this binary vision and propose a QoE management mechanism. In particular, we propose a one-to-many negotiation mechanism allowing the provider to undertake satisfaction management : to meet fine-grained user QoE goals, while still minimizing the costs. This problem is formulated as an optimization problem, for which a linear model is proposed. For reference, a generic linear program solver is used to find the optimal solution, and an alternative heuristic algorithm is devised in order to improve the responsiveness, when the system has to scale up with fast growing number of users. Both are implemented and experimentally evaluated against state-of-the-art one-to-many negotiation frameworks.

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