SoCast: Social ties based cooperative video multicast

In this paper, we propose SoCast - a cooperative video multicast framework to stimulate effective cooperation among mobile users (clients), by leveraging two types of important social ties, i.e., social trust and social reciprocity. By using SoCast, clients can form groups to restore incomplete video frames by obtaining missing packets from other clients, according to the unique video encoding structure. In return, the user perception video quality of mobile video multicast can be improved. Specifically, we first cast the problem of social ties based group formation among clients as a coalitional game, and then devise a distributed algorithm to obtain the core solution (group formation) for the formulated coalitional game. Further, a resource allocation mechanism is proposed for the base station to handle radio resource requests from client groups. Extensive numerical studies with real video traces corroborate the significant performance gain by using the SoCast.