Profit Maximization for Sponsored Data in Wireless Video Transmission Systems

Recently, sponsored data started to gain wide-spread use in wireless networks. Existing approaches for regular data services when applying to video transmission in sponsored data faces tremendous challenges. In two-sided markets, internal and external competitions among service providers (SPs), content provider (CPs), and end-users (EUs) become more complex, because larger video-bandwidth significantly increases the cost. When the three parties benefit from sponsored data, pricing and transmission design become much more complicated and difficult in parameterized systems by profit decomposing models, because maximizing the total profits among the three parties is a NP-hard problem. In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing the total profits for sponsored video data. We propose a submodular-based optimization framework for wireless video transmission systems. First, we formulate the sponsored data models in wireless video transmission respective to SP, CPs and EUs sides. The proposed profit models are used in wireless broadcasting networks with a specific attention to sponsored video data. Second, we construct a layered video transmission model in two-sided market through incorporating submodularity. We approximate the NP-hard layered-video broadcasting problem by applying submodular theory. Third, we present a profit maximization framework that optimizes the number of sponsored users, pricing and bandwidth provision. The profit of SP is maximized as well as the profit of CPs is improved and the cost-effective QoE of EUs is guaranteed. To verify the efficiency, we perform the experiments for different pricing schemes. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches because the proposed method can achieve maximum profits of both SP and CPs in a wide range of transmission rates.