A Resource-Efficient Content Sharing Mechanism in Large-Scale UAV Named Data Networking

In recent years, there has been significant attention in UAV Named Data Networking (UNDN) from both industry and academia. This network paradigm adopts a “request-reply” communication model that allows UAVs to access desired content without the need for specific information regarding the geographical location or IP address of the content producer. This IP-independent design is well-suited for dynamic UAV swarms, but it presents challenges in establishing matching policies between content consumers and producers. This is because that during the distributed decision-making process in content sharing, consumers cannot possess private information regarding producers, and producers may lack the motivation to distribute content. As a result, a revelation and incentive mechanism is needed to be formulated in the system. In this paper, a resource-efficient content-sharing mechanism is proposed to address the aforementioned challenges. First, we propose a contract-based mechanism to incentivize content producers to share content and reveal their private information at the same time. The problem of obtaining the optimal contract is discussed in both cases of information asymmetry and complete information. Then, the Gale-Shapley (GS) algorithm is adopted to make a stable many-to-one matching between content consumers and content producers. The simulation results verify the feasibility, effectiveness and energy efficiency of the proposed mechanism.