Incorporating User Willingness for Message Forwarding in Multi-Hop Content Distribution Scenarios

A video streaming scenario in a wireless Ad Hoc network is considered. In this scenario, nodes are interested in streaming a video available at a single source node. The video will be disseminated throughout the network in a multihop fashion such that some intermediate nodes spend part of their energy for relaying the video. The end-users have different preferences in terms of the amount of energy they prefer to spend for forwarding video. We categorize them into two sets: the high-willingness-to-forward nodes and the low-willingness-toforward nodes. As incentive, the nodes which contribute more in the network receive high video quality while the rest of the nodes receive a basic video quality. The Scalable video coding (SVC) technique is exploited for streaming different video qualities to the nodes based on their energy contributions. We propose using two broadcast trees to connect the nodes based on their contribution level. Constructing the broadcast tree is based on a decentralized game-based algorithm. Simulation results show that by having more nodes with high contribution in the network, the users’ quality of experience as well as the network efficiency in terms of bits per joule increases.