Coalition Based Bandwidth Allocation in Mobile Social Networks

In Mobile Social Networks (MSN), users can subscribe to online services and receive service data through base stations in addition to exchanging data directly. When multiple users in the same cell subscribe to the same service, the base station needs to forward the service data to all these users individually, leading to low utilization of the wireless resource. In order to improve the bandwidth efficiency, we propose an original Coalition based Bandwidth Allocation (CBA) scheme so that users can share bandwidth in the process of data receiving. In CBA, each user can receive data directly from the base station with an independent bandwidth, or join a coalition and share bandwidth with the coalition users. Towards efficient coalition formation, distributed computing is adopted to calculate the profit of each user by considering both data rate and data receiving delay. Based on the achievable profit, each user can rationally decide whether to join/quit a coalition. Then, coalitions can be formed in a distributed way and bandwidth is allocated based on coalition formation. Simulation results show that CBA can significantly improve the bandwidth efficiency of the network at the cost of controlled data receiving delay.