A Controlled Coalitional Game for Wireless Connection Sharing and Bandwidth Allocation in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks have been introduced as a new efficient (i.e., minimize resource usage) and effective (i.e., maximize the number of target recipients) way to disseminate content and information to a particular group of mobile users sharing the same interests. In this paper, we investigate how the content providers and the network operator can interact to distribute content in a mobile social network. The objective of each content provider is to minimize the cost pertaining to the time used for distributing the content to all subscribed mobile users as well as the cost due to the price paid to network operator for transferring the content over a wireless connection via a base station. While the content providers can cooperate by establishing coalitions for sharing a wireless connection, the network operator can control the amount of bandwidth of the wireless connection. We introduce a novel coalitional game model, referred to as "controlled coalitional game", to investi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Dusit Niyato, Zhu Han, Walid Saad, Are Hjørungnes
• Keywords: Communications, Content Provider, GLOBECOM 2010, Mobile Social Network, Network Operator