Theil utility based multi-device cooperation mechanism for service quality equilibrium in ubiquitous stub environments

Abstract

An approach to make heterogeneous devices cooperate with each other to provide ubiquitous service remains a longstanding challenge in ubiquitous environments. In addition, when multi-user request ubiquitous services simultaneously, the arbitrariness in resource allocation process easily leads to non-equilibrium of qualities of multi-user's services. Thus, How to design an effective heterogeneous devices cooperation mechanism that meet the QoS requirements and also equilibrate QoS among multi-user's services becomes a very tough problem. In the paper, Equilibrium Index and Theil Utility function are imported to establish a multidevice equilibrium cooperation model, which is beneft for resource allocation in ubiquitous environments. Then a Theil-Equilibrium based Cooperation Mechanism for multi-service is proposed. Firstly, in order to simplify calculating, a dimensionless processing is introduced. After that, a cooperation approach with Theil-Utility Heuristic algorithm is designed to choose the best solution for the simplified model. At last, the mechanism is simulated in a smart home scenario. The simulation results show that this mechanism outperforms non-equilibrium method by improving almost 40% in internal equilibrium with just reducing 0-2% in the total utility of all the requested ubiquitous services. These data show that the proposed mechanism performs well in equilibrating qualities of multi-user's ubiquitous services.