Quality-oriented incentive mechanism for video delivery in opportunistic networks

In recent years, more and more people begin to focus on data delivery through opportunistic contacts among mobile users, and in most case, the data that we expect to share with others are videos. Due to that the delivery of video data will consume numerous resources of devices, few people will provide such service for others without any benefit. Thus, this paper centers on the incentive mechanism design for video delivery in opportunistic networks. Up to now, several incentive schemes for opportunistic networks have been proposed, however, they all mainly focus on the encouragement of general data forwarding, and almost none of them aims to stimulate nodes to realize the performance objective of networks. In this paper, we propose a novel quality-oriented incentive mechanism for video delivery, which takes the characteristics of video data into account and formulates the video delivery among nodes as a game. This mechanism could not only encourage nodes to participate in the video delivery but also stimulate them to follow the defined rules to optimize the video delivery quality of whole networks. The performance of this mechanism is validated through extensive simulations.