An Integrated Incentive Mechanism for Device to Device (D2D)-Enabled Cellular Traffic Offloading

Cooperative content offloading is a promising technology to relieve the heavy burden of wireless cellular networks, and meanwhile can improve the quality of downloading services. While various optimization frameworks have been intensively studied (e.g., maximizing the amount of cellular traffic that can be offloaded, etc.), little attention has been given to how to systematically accommodate various stakeholders´ rational behaviors and incentivize their cooperation. In this paper, we propose an integrated incentive mechanism which incorporates the utilities of three rational stakeholders in traffic offloading: cellular provider and end users including waiting users and downloading users. This incentive mechanism explicitly includes two components. In the first component of reverse auction based incentive mechanism, the cellular provider can classify the general users into downloading users and waiting users, and the waiting users can get some rewards for waiting some time (i.e., delaying their downloading through cellular provider). Besides being involved in the reverse auction phase, in the second component of charge policy based incentive mechanism, the waiting users can obtain data from the downloading user in D2D way, and pay both downloading user and per intermediate node on the delivery path with parts of rewards earned from cellular providers. Preliminary theoretical analysis illustrates this integrated incentive mechanism has the following features: Cellular provide can offload traffic with minimum cost, users in reverse auction will truthfully report their valuations on traffic loading, downloading users can obtain extra reward from waiting users in sybil-proof way (i.e., thwarting edge insertion attack).