Analysis of a Distance-Based Pairing Scheme for Collaborative Content Distribution via Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract

With the increasing penetration of smart devices, device-to-device (D2D) communications offer a promising paradigm to accommodate the ever-growing mobile video traffic and unremitting demands for fast content distribution. The redundant storage and communication capacities of smart devices can be exploited for collaborative content caching and distribution. Such united resources at the network edge can serve end users with low delivery cost and high performance. In this paper, we analyze a heuristic distance-based scheme, which appropriately pairs a device requesting a content item with a cache device within a collaboration distance and providing the requested content. An analytical framework is developed to derive the optimal collaboration distance so as to maximize the likelihood that the paired cache devices successfully fulfill the content requests. The simulation results validate the analytical framework and the effectiveness of the heuristic distance-based scheme for D2D-assisted content distribution. We also investigate the effects of various system parameters on the performance in terms of expected satisfaction probability.