Content pricing in mobile social network: a collective bidding approach
Date
2019-08
Authors
Awuor, Mzee
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Strathmore University
Abstract
As smart mobile devices and phones become more ubiquitous and pervasive with wide array of sensors
and communication techniques, we can develop mobile social network (MSN) apps that enable these
devices to automatically create virtual communities where contents can be shared implicitly. For instance,
your smartphone could assist you have a productive encounter with other MSN users by informing you
about their interests and valuable contents that they may share with you. Example of such application is
Whozthat which uses MSN to enrich offline social interactions among strangers by suggesting topics of
common interest. Thus, MSNs enable users to discover and share contents with each other, especially at
ephemeral events such as exhibitions and conferences. Nevertheless, the incentive of users to actively
share their contents in MSNs may be lacking if the corresponding cost is high. In this paper, we propose
a content pricing and sharing framework in MSN that is built on users’ collective bidding and content cost
sharing. The content sharing problem is formulated as a distributed system that achieves cooperative
outcome while preserving non-cooperative decision making among the users through the proposed
collective bidding and broadcast nature of wireless communication. That is, co-located peers individually
propose payments to their encounters whose contents they are interested in based on their perceived values
of the contents. The respective content owners share their contents if the proposed payments can
collectively compensate the cost of sharing their contents with these peers. We show that this guarantees
individual rationality and promotes content sharing among the opportunistic encounters in the network.
Performance evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism reduces the time and cost to collect contents
of interest in the network and significantly improves network utilization.
Description
Paper presented at the 5th Strathmore International Mathematics Conference (SIMC 2019), 12 - 16 August 2019, Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya
Keywords
Mobile social networks, Content sharing, Collective bidding, Content pricing