SIM: An Incentive Mechanism Based on Signaling Games for Device-to-Device Content-Sharing

Abstract

Device-to-device D2D content sharing has been considered as an efficient solution to offload cellular network traffic. However, the user equipments (UEs) need to be motivated to serve as content providers (CPs) with an efficient incentive mechanism. In this paper, the D2D content sharing problem is modeled as a labor market, where the base station (BS) acts as the principal and the content providers are agents according to the Principal-Agent model. The types of agents are separated by the channel situation and the remaining energy, which are not known by the principal due to the Information Asymmetry. We propose a signaling-based incentive mechanism (SIM) to encourage the content providers to participate in the content sharing. Besides, the optimal contract for each content provider is designed to maximize all the CP's total utility in the labor market. Simulation results show that SIM can significantly incentive the high-type CP's participation comparing to the other two incentive schemes.