A Fair Cooperative Content-Sharing Service

Wireless cooperative content sharing, based on the synergistic use of cellular and short-range technologies, has recently gained much interest from academic and industrial communities. Besides energy saving and information transfer delay reduction, this paradigm can enable a significant reduction in cellular bandwidth usage, which also means monetary saving for users. In fact, such a cooperation is usually opposed by network and service providers, because it strongly reduces their potential profits. This paper deals with the provider perspective, too. In particular, a ‘‘mediated cooperative behavior’’ is proposed and analyzed within a scenario of short-range wireless file-sharing. The basic idea is that providers offer the possibility to users of cooperatively downloading contents, and increase their own profits because more users are attracted by such a service. Indeed, by participating in the devised service, users both avoid a (possibly expensive) stand-alone download of the desired product, and benefit of a special group-discount. The costs (and download tasks) distribution among users is based on a cooperative game theoretic model. Indeed, suitable solution concepts are applied to provide a fair solution, acceptable by all users, and hence to overcome the limitation of traditional optimization approaches to costs (and tasks) distribution.