An efficient bandwidth aggregation algorithm using game theory for multimedia transmission

The current 2G and 3G network infrastructures were not originally designed with multimedia transmission in consideration. Unlike data transmission, multimedia has significantly different Quality of Service requirements. It requires significantly higher bandwidth in comparison with data transmission. Multimedia transmission over handheld devices (such as mobile phones) poses further challenges in maintaining a good Quality of Experience as wireless networks are inherently of low bandwidth and relatively unreliable. Handheld devices are resource constraint devices and therefore huge processing at the handheld devices may introduce delay in the multimedia reception. In this paper, we present an algorithm for bandwidth aggregation for multimedia transmission from a handheld device using the available bandwidth of other handheld devices. We use a distributed approach to play a non-zero sum game among the handheld devices to minimize the end-to-end delay and maximize the throughput. We incorporate a cooperative game to dynamically add or delete other handheld devices based on the requirements of the network. We validate our work and demonstrate its benefits.