A QoE-Aware Resource Distribution Framework Incentivizing Context Sharing and Moderate Competition

Abstract

We contend that context information of Internet clients can help to efficiently manage a variety of underlying resources for different Internet services and systems. We therefore propose a resource distribution framework that provides quality of experience (QoE) aware service differentiation, which means that starving clients are prioritized in resource allocation to enhance the corresponding end-user's QoE. The framework also actively motivates each Internet client to consistently provide its actual context information and to adopt moderate competition policies, given that all clients are selfish but rational in nature. We analyze the Internet client's behavior by formulating a non-cooperative game and prove that the framework guides all clients (game players) towards a unique Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we prove that the distribution results computed by the framework maximize a social welfare function. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate the motivation, operation and performance of the framework by presenting a Web system example, which leverages on the advanced context information deduced by a context-aware system.