Noncollaborative Resource Management for Wireless Multimedia Applications Using Mechanism Design

We propose to add a new dimension to existing wireless multimedia communications systems by enabling competing stations to proactively engage in the resource management game by adapting their cross-layer transmission strategies. For this, we model wireless stations (WSTAs) as rational and selfish players competing for available wireless resources in a dynamic game. We focus on polling-based wireless LAN (WLAN) networks, where developing an efficient solution for managing the available transmission opportunities is of paramount importance. The resource allocation game is coordinated by a network moderator, which deploys a novel resource management based on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to determine a) the amount of time to be allocated to the various users and b) the transmission cost associated to the allocated resources. The transmission cost is referred to in the VCG mechanism as "transfer" and depends not on the used resources, but rather on the inconvenience (in terms of utility impact) that it causes to other WSTAs. The transfer is introduced in order to discourage WSTAs from lying about their resource requirements. Importantly, this proposed dynamic resource management approach for wireless multimedia applications changes the passive way stations are currently adapting their cross-layer strategies by enabling them to selfishly influence the wireless systems dynamics by proactively adapting their packet scheduling strategies, error protection strategies, etc. Hence, each wireless station can play the resource management game by adapting its multimedia transmission strategy depending on the experienced channel conditions, derived video quality, attitude towards risk, willingness to pay for resources and available information about the wireless network. Our simulations show that using the VCG mechanism the WSTAs do not have any incentives to lie about their resource requirements as otherwise they will be severely penalized by a high transfer. We also show that deploying advanced cross-layer strategies for playing the resource management game significantly benefit the WSTAs' received video quality. The willingness-to-pay for resources is introduced to provide WSTAs a tool to gather additional resources whenever they need to transmit an important (part of a) video sequence by agreeing to pay for resources an increased cost. A novel risk-aware scheduling scheme is also proposed that provides WSTAs the ability to dynamically avoid network congestion and hence, reduce their incurred transfer