Multiuser Rate Allocation Games for Multimedia Communications

How to efficiently and fairly allocate data rate among different users is a key problem in the field of multiuser multimedia communication. However, most of the existing optimization-based methods, such as minimizing the weighted sum of the distortions or maximizing the weighted sum of the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNRs), have their weights heuristically determined. Moreover, those approaches mainly focus on the efficiency issue while there is no notion of fairness. In this paper, the authors address this problem by proposing a game-theoretic framework, in which the utility/payoff function of each user/player is jointly determined by the characteristics of the transmitted video sequence and the allocated bit-rate.