Enabling secure wireless multimedia resource pricing using consortium blockchains

Abstract Wireless Service Providers (WSPs) and Content Providers (CPs) charge common data price according to the flat rate, the transmission time, or the data usage, irrespective of the content characteristics. The multimedia compression parameters that determine the multimedia importance diversities among frames have largely been ignored in media pricing research. We establish a new economics-driven resource allocation framework for multimedia transmissions among WSPs, CPs, and End Users (EUs) based on Smart Media Pricing (SMP). The WSPs transmit media streams provided by CPs to the EUs to earn money. However, facing with the transaction security and privacy protection issues, we undertake promising consortium blockchain to improve resource pricing transaction security without reliance on a trusted third party. A novel Stackelberg game with consortium blockchain is firstly established to allocate transmission resources such as Transmission Times’ Limitations (TTLs) from an economic point of view. Then we investigate the utility maximization problems of the leader (WSP and CP) and the follower (EU) in terms of TTLs respectively. Finally, the optimal TTL and the optimal price are non-uniformly determined for each frame according to the game equilibria, by analyzing the payment from EUs, the channel conditions, and the media characteristics in terms of frame importance. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme achieves better transaction security and privacy protection. Experimental comparison with uniform pricing based on equal TTL or equal frame importance validates the effectiveness of the proposed economic model.