Operator’s Economy of Device-to-Device Offloading in Underlaying Cellular Networks

Offloading onto device-to-device (D2D) communications is considered a promising technology to alleviate traffic load of cellular networks. However, the success of D2D communications relies on user's willingness to share contents and operator's incentives to tolerate interference in networks, which has been overlooked in most literature. We propose an incentive framework of D2D offloading, where the operator encourages some users acting as D2D transmitters to broadcast their popular contents to nearby region to improve operators, overall economic efficiency. A two-stage Stackelberg game is employed to analytically model such interaction: The operator (leader) determines the incentive price to maximize its interests and D2D transmitters (followers) choose appropriate traffic volume to be offloaded. The transmit powers at the base station and D2D transmitters are simultaneously characterized by considering the intra-tier and inter-tier interferences in complex cellular networks. Simulations confirm that the cellular operator can fully utilize the spectrum and significantly increase its profit by incorporating this D2D offloading incentive mechanism.