Incentive-Rewarding Mechanism for User-position Control in Mobile Services

Makoto YOSHINO  Kenichiro SATO  Ryoichi SHINKUMA  Tatsuro TAKAHASHI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E91-B   No.10   pp.3132-3140
Publication Date: 2008/10/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e91-b.10.3132
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Next-Generation Mobile Multimedia Communications)
Category: 
Keyword: 
incentive reward,  cost,  radio resource,  user position control,  

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Summary: 
When the number of users in a service area increases in mobile multimedia services, no individual user can obtain satisfactory radio resources such as bandwidth and signal power because the resources are limited and shared. A solution for such a problem is user-position control. In the user-position control, the operator informs users of better communication areas (or spots) and navigates them to these positions. However, because of subjective costs caused by subjects moving from their original to a new position, they do not always attempt to move. To motivate users to contribute their resources in network services that require resource contributions for users, incentive-rewarding mechanisms have been proposed. However, there are no mechanisms that distribute rewards appropriately according to various subjective factors involving users. Furthermore, since the conventional mechanisms limit how rewards are paid, they are applicable only for the network service they targeted. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive-rewarding mechanism to solve these problems, using an external evaluator and interactive learning agents. We also investigated ways of appropriately controlling rewards based on user contributions and system service quality. We applied the proposed mechanism and reward control to the user-position control, and demonstrated its validity.