A multi-dimensional auction mechanism for mobile crowdsourced video streaming

Abstract

Adaptive bitrate video streaming is a widely-used technology for mobile video streaming over HTTP. In this work, we study a crowdsourced video streaming framework, which enables nearby mobile users to crowdsource their radio resources for cooperatively adaptive bitrate video streaming. We propose a multi-dimensional auction based incentive mechanism to promote the user cooperation, supporting the asynchronous downloading and the bitrate adapting of video users. In this mechanism, each user initiates an auction whenever he is ready to download a new data segment in an asynchronous fashion, and all nearby users compete for the downloading opportunity by submitting a multidimensional bid consisting of the intended segment bitrate and the associated value. Design of such a multi-dimensional auction is very challenging, as we need to guarantee the user's truthful reporting on the information on multiple dependent dimensions. We first propose a truthful second-score (multi-dimensional) auction framework, within which we further derive the efficient mechanism that maximizes the social welfare (of each segment downloading) and the sub-optimal mechanism that approximately maximizes the auctioneer payoff. Experiment results show that our proposed crowdsourced streaming can achieve 60% ∼ 76% of the maximum social welfare even when 80 percentage of users lose their direct network connections.