A Generalized Best-Response Smart Media Pricing Economic Model for Wireless Multimedia Communications

How to jointly provide Quality of Experience (QoE) to mobile multimedia users and simultaneously address the profit maximization issue of Content Provider (CP) - Wireless Carrier (WC) is a new economic challenge in wireless multimedia communications. In this paper, we consider leveraging the Smart Media Pricing (SMP) concept and develop a generalized best-response game theoretical model to determine the consumed data traffic from users and the media price charged by CPWC alliance. Based on the SMP utility models of user and CPWC alliance, a generalized game theoretical best-response game model is proposed to solve the non-cooperative selfish competition between the two players, which does not require concavity of the utility function at all. In the proposed Best Response Nash Equilibrium (BRNE) algorithm, both pure strategy and mixed-strategy schemes are developed for attaining the equilibrium solutions of the CP-WC’s data price and user’s amount of data consumption. Simulation study demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed BRNE algorithm that both user and CP-WC alliance get better utility when the system takes the Nash Equilibrium solutions.