Energy-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Content Sharing through Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract

The traffic of the base station can be offloaded by content sharing through device-to-device (D2D) communications if popular on-demand contents have been cached in user devices. In D2D content sharing, the receiving user gains benefit by obtaining contents while the transmitting user has to consume the transmission energy. However, users are selfish and have no obligation to help others. To motivate user involvement in D2D content sharing, we propose an energy-aware incentive mechanism where the key idea is that physically neighboring users can form a collaborative group. In a collaborative group, a user obtains contents from other users while consuming energy on providing contents to other users. We model the problem as a coalition formation game with non- transferable utility. To solve the problem, we also propose an algorithm which is proved to be of convergence and stability. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed mechanism has significant performance gains compared with two baseline schemes.