Incentivizing Sharing in Realtime D2D Streaming Networks: A Mean Field Game Perspective

TL;DR

This paper develops a mean field game framework to incentivize cooperation among wireless devices in live streaming, reducing costly base-station usage while maintaining quality, validated through real-world Android experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel incentive mechanism based on truth-telling auctions for D2D streaming, modeled with mean field games to handle large device populations.

Findings

Efficient incentive mechanism reduces B2D usage

Mean field game accurately models device interactions

System performs well in real-world Android tests

Abstract

We consider the problem of streaming live content to a cluster of co-located wireless devices that have both an expensive unicast base-station-to-device (B2D) interface, as well as an inexpensive broadcast device-to-device (D2D) interface, which can be used simultaneously. Our setting is a streaming system that uses a block-by-block random linear coding approach to achieve a target percentage of on-time deliveries with minimal B2D usage. Our goal is to design an incentive framework that would promote such cooperation across devices, while ensuring good quality of service. Based on ideas drawn from truth-telling auctions, we design a mechanism that achieves this goal via appropriate transfers (monetary payments or rebates) in a setting with a large number of devices, and with peer arrivals and departures. Here, we show that a Mean Field Game can be used to accurately approximate our system. Furthermore, the complexity of calculating the best responses under this regime is low. We implement the proposed system on an Android testbed, and illustrate its efficient performance using real world experiments.