An incentive mechanism under Hidden-Action for device-to-device content sharing

Content Sharing via Device-to-Device (D2D) communications can significantly offload the cellular network traffic and provide high spectrum efficiency. However, D2D content sharing requires a proper incentive mechanism to encourage the idle user equipments (IUEs) to be the content provider, which is energy-consuming. In this paper, we focus on the incentive mechanism design in the base station (BS) controlled content sharing problem under a contract-theory framework, and propose a performance-related reward in the contract to motivate the content provider to put more “effort” and solve the Hidden-Action problem. A Performance-Related Content Sharing Incentive (PRCSI) algorithm is proposed to implement the proposed incentive mechanism. Simulation results show that the PRCSI can motivate the content provider well and increase the data rate.