A social-aware content delivery scheme based on D2D communications underlying cellular networks: a Stackelberg game approach

Content delivery based on device-to-device (D2D) communications has been widely considered an effective response to the prevalence of content sharing and local services. In order to ensure its advantages, content requesters (CRs) should decide from which content providers (CPs) they obtain the desired content. Moreover, no CP will provide contents for free; thus, an incentive should be given to motivate the CPs. In this work, we solve the content delivery utilizing a monetary incentive. In particular, each CP just transmits a part of the content to CR to reduce the energy consumption. Simultaneously, we introduce the social tie to improve the incentive efficiency, with the popularity of mobile social networks. Specifically, considering the two-layer architecture consisting of the CR and the CPs, a Stackelberg game model is introduced to model the content delivery. The CR works as the leader, and decides the monetary incentive. The CPs work as the followers, and decide the proportion of the provided content. Then, the expression of the Stackelberg equilibrium is given, and a content delivery and pricing algorithm based on the Stackelberg game is designed to converge to the Stackelberg equilibrium through finite-time iterations. Simulation results provide evidences for its efficiency.