Incentive mechanism and content provider selection for device-to-device-based content sharing

Content sharing based on device-to-device (D2D) communications has been regarded as a promising technology to offload traffic from the overburdened cellular networks. Efficient D2D content sharing requires an incentive mechanism to encourage mobile devices to participate, and the optimal content-provider selection scheme is also necessary if multiple candidate providers exist. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive scoring mechanism (CSM), which calculates a score for each candidate content provider based on their historical content supply record, current transmission rate, and expected reward. The CSM establishes the relationship between the historical content supply record and the expected reward, and makes it possible to select the content provider with an achievable transmission rate appropriate for the requested content. Based on the CSM and the Hungarian algorithm, we propose a Content-sharing Incentive and Provider Selection (CIPS) algorithm to optimize the selection of content providers for multiple concurrent content requesters. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed CIPS algorithm can effectively motivate mobile devices to participate in content sharing and can select the most appropriate content provider(s) from multiple candidates.