Incorporating User Willingness in Contract-Based Incentive Mechanism for D2D Cooperative Data Forwarding

Device-to-device (D2D) cooperative communication is regarded as a technology which can significantly improve the spectrum efficiency and network capacity. However, the high dependence of cooperative communication on user participation makes the design of incentive mechanism become an issue of great concern. In this paper, a contract-based benefit allocation mechanism is firstly proposed to optimize the benefits of sending users and cooperative users. In such mechanism, sending user is as a contract principal and cooperative user is as a contract agent, by formulating the utility function of both contract parties, maximum benefits between them can be obtained under the control of the base station (BS). What’s more, by considering the social relationships between sending users and cooperative users, user preference which describes subjective willingness with each other is further introduced in this paper. Finally, a stable matching algorithm based on the calculation of user satisfaction is proposed combining the benefits and preference of sending users and cooperative users. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively encourage users to participate in cooperation, thus ensures high performances in terms of utility and user satisfaction.