Barter Exchange Economy: A New Solution Concept for Resource Sharing in Wireless Multimedia Cloud Networks

Abstract

One of the most significant types of Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) is Cloud-based Wireless Multimedia Social Networks (CWMSNs). We believe that microeconomics theory is a good candidate to model the bandwidth sharing operations in CWMSNs. We model the interactions of mobile users in terms of the barter exchange economy. In our modeling, bandwidth is chosen as the exchangeable commodity and mobile users and desktop users act as players . From a microeconomics point of view, the allocated bandwidth subject to each service plays the role of “endowment” (budget) for players. With this endowment and leveraging the concept of barter exchange, mobile users can interact with each other to gain more quality of service (QoS) in the future. We prove that by applying the exchange economy, users’ social welfare could reach to global maximum, known as Pareto efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, the idea of a barter exchange economy has never been employed in any study on cloud computing. Simulation results, obtained through the CloudSim framework, established the robustness of our modeling in terms of significant metrics such as social welfare, number of blocked users, satisfaction level, and Pareto efficiency.