Edge-Node Assisted Live Video Streaming: A Coalition Formation Game Approach

Live video streaming has emerged as one of the most popular network applications over the course of the past years. Note that providing live video streaming service is costly for a platform because of heavy bandwidth consumption from the platform to end-users. To cope with the above issue, our proposal is to exploit the upload bandwidth of volunteers, namely, edge or fog nodes (ENs), to form an EN-assisted transmission platform. In this system, the platform on the one hand distributes data replicas to ENs which can respond to requests of their associated end-users; on the other hand, it supplements to fulfill end-user's demands that ENs can not accommodate. Note that there are possibly overlapped end-users associated between two ENs, which can result in further mitigating bandwidth consumption if ENs work cooperatively. Thus, in this study, we first design a metric to measure “neighboring” property between two ENs and devise a cooperative approach from the perspective of coalition formation game. From our analysis, the proposed formation algorithm can converge to a stable state. Simulation results verify the stability and effectiveness of the proposal.