Enabling Multi-Source Device-to-Device Content Delivery in Cellular Networks

Multi-source device-to-device (D2D) communication allows the base station (BS) to serve the content requests of the users locally through D2D links. As a result, the load on the base stations (BSs) and the consumption of radio resources reduces significantly. Clearly, the success of multi-source content delivery relies on the willingness of the content owners (COs), i.e., sources, to deliver their content to requesting user. Consequently, in this article, we investigate the economic interaction between single BS and multiple COs for content delivery. In view of the fact that participating COs are heterogeneous with respect to the amount of content in their cache and the sensitivity towards energy consumption, there is a need to design a fair incentive mechanism which motivates COs for content delivery. To this end, we model the interaction among the BS and multiple COs as one-to-many bargaining game and design an incentive mechanism based on the Nash bargaining framework. Specifically, we obtain the optimal amount of content delivered by participating COs and their corresponding incentives under two variants of one-to-many bargaining, namely sequential bargaining and concurrent bargaining. For both variants of bargaining, the obtained optimal solutions are capable of minimizing the amount of content delivered by the BS while ensuring fair incentive transfer among the participating COs.