Incentive Mechanism for Cached-Enabled Small Cell Sharing: A Stackelberg Game Approach

In this paper, we study a small-cell caching system consisting of one privately-owned small base station (SBS) and multiple content providers (CPs), where CPs leverage the caching capabilities of SBSs to efficiently provide content delivery service to mobile subscribers. Specifically, an incentive cache mechanism is proposed, to stimulate the privately- owned SBS and CPs to participate in the caching system. A two-stage Stackelberg game is formulated for the interaction between the SBS and CPs. In the first stage, the private SBS first decides the price policy to maximize the profit. In the second stage, according to the charge price, each CP determines the amount of caching storage to maximize its utility. The impact of transmission congestion on CP utility is also taken into consideration, which also influences CPs' decisions. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium, and design an optimal pricing algorithm to maximize the SBS's revenue. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, which demonstrates the efficiency and feasibility on the SBS resource sharing.