Coalitional Game Framework for Content Distribution Using Device-to-Device Communication

Abstract

We consider a set of cellular users associated with a base station (BS) in a cellular network that employs Device-to-device (D2D) communication. A subset of the users request for some files from a server associated with the BS. Now, some of the users can potentially act as relays and forward the requested files, or partitions of files, from the BS to some of the requesting users (destination nodes) over D2D links. However, this requires cooperation among the cellular users. Also, when cellular users cooperate with each other, the total amount of energy consumed in transferring the requested files from the BS to the destination nodes can usually be considerably reduced compared to the case when each user separately downloads the file it needs from the BS. In this paper, we seek conditions under which users have an incentive to cooperate with each other. To this end, we model the above scenario using the frameworks of cooperative game theory and stable partitions in coalitional games. We consider two different models for file transfer within a coalition: (i) Model A, in which the BS can split a file into multiple partitions and send these partitions to different relays, which multicast the partitions to the destination nodes of the coalition, and (ii) Model B, in which for each file, the BS sends the entire file to a single relay, which multicasts it to the destination nodes of the coalition. First, we explore the question of whether it is beneficial for all the cellular users to cooperate, i.e., whether the grand coalition is stable. For this we use the solution concept of core from cooperative game theory. We show that, in general, the above coalitional game under Model A may have an empty core, i.e., it may not be possible to stabilize the grand coalition. Next, we provide conditions under which 1) the core is always non-empty and 2) a \mathbb D <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">c</sub> -stable partition always exists. Also, we show that under Model B, the problem of assigning relays to destination nodes so as to maximize the sum of utilities of all the users is NP-Complete. Finally, using numerical computations, we evaluate the energy consumption of the cellular users under the cooperation and no cooperation cases for Model A and the performance of different heuristics for solving the above problem of assigning relays to destination nodes under Model B.