Optimal selfishness-aware device-assisted content delivery in cellular networks

Utilization of device-to-device communication links provides an alternative way for mitigating the skyrocketing mobile data growth that challenges cellular operators nowadays. Namely, the owners of these devices can serve requests of their neighbors for the files that are stored at their caches. However, users are unwilling in general to serve requests of others, since data transmission incurs energy consumption. The issue is further perplexed, if one considers realistic parameters such as the limited capacity of the device's battery. In this work, we explicitly take into account the above aspects and formulate the content request routing problem aiming to minimize the load of the macrocellular base station. This problem is challenging to solve due to its discrete nature. We derive an optimal polynomial-time solution based on a reduction to a matching problem. Besides, we present a light-weight distributed algorithm for its solution. Simulation results reveal the performance benefits of our approach.