Multi-user multimedia resource management using Nash bargaining solution

Multi-user multimedia applications such as enterprise streaming, surveillance, and gaming are recently emerging, and they are often deployed over bandwidth-constrained network infrastructures. To ensure the Quality of Service required by the delay-sensitive and bandwidth intensive multimedia data for these applications, efficient resource (bandwidth) management becomes paramount. We propose to deploy the well-known game theoretic concept of bargaining to allocate the bandwidth fairly and optimally among multiple collaborative users. Specifically, we consider the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) for our resource management problem. We provide interpretations for the NBS for multi-user resource allocation: the NBS can be used to maximize the system quality. The bargaining strategies and solutions are implemented in the network using a resource manager, which explicitly considers the application-specific distortion for the bandwidth allocation.