# Multi-Dimensional Auction Mechanisms for Crowdsourced Mobile Video Streaming

## TL;DR

This paper introduces auction-based incentive mechanisms for crowdsourced mobile video streaming, ensuring truthful participation and improved social welfare through simulations and real-world experiments.

## Contribution

It proposes novel multi-dimensional auction mechanisms for incentivizing resource sharing in mobile video streaming, achieving truthfulness and efficiency.

## Key findings

- Crowdsourced streaming with auctions improves social welfare by 48.6%.
- Users cooperating via the auction increase their welfare by 15.5% and 35.4%.
- Demo system experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms.

## Abstract

Crowdsourced mobile video streaming enables nearby mobile video users to aggregate network resources to improve their video streaming performances. However, users are often selfish and may not be willing to cooperate without proper incentives. Designing an incentive mechanism for such a scenario is challenging due to the users' asynchronous downloading behaviors and their private valuations for multi-bitrate coded videos. In this work, we propose both single-object and multi-object multi-dimensional auction mechanisms, through which users sell the opportunities for downloading single and multiple video segments with multiple bitrates, respectively. Both auction mechanisms can achieves truthfulness (i.e, truthful private information revelation) and efficiency (i.e., social welfare maximization). Simulations with real traces show that crowdsourced mobile streaming facilitated by the auction mechanisms outperforms noncooperative stream ing by 48.6% (on average) in terms of social welfare. To evaluate the real-world performance, we also construct a demo system for crowdsourced mobile streaming and implement our proposed auction mechanism. Experiments over the demo system further show that those users who provide resources to others and those users who receive helps can increase their welfares by 15.5% and 35.4% (on average) via cooperation, respectively.