Multi-Dimensional Auction Mechanisms for Crowdsourced Mobile Video Streaming

Crowdsourced mobile video streaming enables nearby mobile video users to aggregate network resources to improve their video streaming performances. However, users are often selfish and may not be willing to cooperate without proper incentives. Designing an incentive mechanism for such a scenario is challenging due to the users’ asynchronous downloading behaviors and their private valuations for multi-bitrate encoded videos. In this paper, we propose both the single-object and multi-object multi-dimensional auction mechanisms, through which users sell the opportunities for downloading single and multiple video segments with multiple bitrates, respectively. Both the auction mechanisms can achieve truthfulness (i.e., truthful private information revelation) and efficiency (i.e., social welfare maximization). Simulations with real traces show that crowdsourced mobile streaming facilitated by the auction mechanisms outperforms noncooperative streaming by 48.6% (on average) in terms of social welfare. To evaluate the real-world performance, we also construct a demo system for crowdsourced mobile streaming and implement our proposed auction mechanism. Experiments over the demo show that those users who provide resources to others and those users who receive help can increase their welfares by 15.5% and 35.4% (on average) via cooperation, respectively.