An Incentive Mechanism Integrating Joint Power, Channel and Link Management for Social-Aware D2D Content Sharing and Proactive Caching

In this paper, a downlink cellular traffic offloading framework with social-aware device-to-device (D2D) content sharing and proactive caching is studied. In the considered system model, each user equipment (UE) is intelligent to determine which content(s) to request/cache and to share according to its own preference. As the central controller, the base station (BS) can establish cellular transmissions and/or incentivize D2D communications for content dissemination (including proactive caching). By taking into account wireless features, social characteristics, and device intelligence, we formulate a welfare maximization problem integrating power control, channel allocation, link scheduling, and reward design. To solve this complicated problem, we propose a novel mechanism which consists of a newly developed optimization approach, called basis transformation method, for the joint resource management, and a specially devised pricing scheme for the reward determination. Theoretical and simulation results examine the desired properties of our proposed mechanism, and demonstrate its superiority in improving social welfare, network capacity, and utility of the BS.