Resource Acquisition from Set-Top-Boxes for Service Provision

Resource Acquisition service is a network-based service that acquires sufficient resources to satisfy the application requirement. Set-top-boxes (STB) are good sources of resource providers delivering this type of service collaboratively. Unfortunately, the accessibility of STBs is controlled by end-node users. It leads to uncertainty of the amount of resource available to the service operators. As an incentive, STB holders acting as resource provider can be remunerated for sharing the resources. Resource acquisition schemes can explore the available resources and provide the upper layer applications with sufficient resources to satisfy the requirements in service level agreement. A remuneration model is developed to reflect the rational decision of resource providers. The authors investigate the resource acquisition scheme under various load distribution and topologies of peer neighbourhood and find that cost-aware Requisition Algorithm can improve the service quality requirement fulfilment in a low cost.