QoE-Sensitive Economic Pricing Model for Wireless Multimedia Communications Using Stackelberg Game

With the advances in wireless multimedia communication technologies and the rise in end- user experience expectations, meeting the Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements of the mobile multimedia user has become challenging for content providers and wireless carriers. In this research, we chalk up a QoE-sensitive multimedia data pricing economic model, by pricing the quality of the data rather than the quantity of the data. Utility maximization problem between the content provider (sells multimedia content), wireless carrier (provides transmission service) and the mobile user (requests multimedia data) is modeled using the proposed framework. We then formulate the aforementioned problem as a two-stage Stackelberg game and derive the Nash Equilibrium using backward induction method. Simulation study show that each player can obtain optimal strategy where the Stackelberg equilibrium exists stably. Finally, the proposed smart pricing mechanism was tested against the traditional uniform pricing scheme and the results indicate that better utilities can be achieved by leveraging the proposed scheme.