A three-stage incentive formation for optimally pricing social data offloading

Abstract

Mobile data offloading via D2D communication is an emerging way to alleviate the traffic overloading burdens in cellular networks and improve mobile users’ satisfactions. However, the third-party offloading service provider (OSP) has no incentive to participate in data offloading considering its personal profit. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a user-initiated incentive mechanism where mobile users (MUs) offer necessary incentives to the OSP for requesting the offloaded traffic. In our model, different pricing rules are designed for the transaction between the OSP and MUs, on which MUs are categorized such as mobile price-takers (MPTs) and mobile price-setters (MPSs). To improve the offloading capacity, social ties between MUs are also introduced to motivate their participation. We therefore formulate a three-stage socially-aware Stackelberg game, which brings balance into the negotiation among the OSP, MPTs and MPSs. In addition, we theoretically prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium of this game, as well as realize it by iterative algorithms. Experimental results further demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism benefits the OSP and MUs.