To Motivate Social Grouping in Wireless Networks

We consider a group of neighboring smartphone users who are roughly at the same time interested in the same network content, while the users can share content enabled by broadcast device-to-device communications. As the users are selfish in practice, an incentive mechanism is needed to motivate the physically neighboring users to form a social group. We propose a novel concept of equal-reciprocal incentive over broadcast networks, which fairly ensures that each pair of users in the social group share the same amount of content with each other. As the equal-reciprocal incentive may restrict the amount of the shared content, we analyze the optimal equal-reciprocal scheme that maximizes the shared content. While ensuring fairness among users, we show that this optimized scheme also maximizes each user's utility. Finally, we look at dynamic content arrivals and extend our incentive scheme successfully by proposing optimal online scheduling algorithms that achieve the equal-reciprocal incentive.