Mobility-aware incentive mechanism for relaying D2D communications

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications emerged as a promising technology to improve the efficiency of 5G cellular networks. However, users should be encouraged to participate in content sharing and relaying, which are necessary for D2D communications. Thus, an incentive mechanism is essential to encourage the content owners and relay nodes to participate in D2D communications. In this study, a contract-based incentive mechanism is proposed for relaying D2D communications. In contrast to previous work, this mechanism simultaneously motivates both content owners and relays to participate in D2D communications. Furthermore, user mobility is considered in the proposed approach. Assuming that the devices in the network are mobile, mobility awareness can be effective in the performance of the proposed incentive mechanism since we need more appropriate contracts that are less likely to be violated due to link failures which are the results of the mobility. Therefore, in the proposed mobility-aware incentive mechanism, the selection of the contract is performed according to the predicted location of devices in the next time step, as obtained from Markov method. The simulation results show that the proposed incentive mechanism increases the participation of devices in D2D content sharing compared to the baseline. Also, it is more likely that a content owner earns more utility due to the cooperation of a relay, which leads to an increase in the utility of the base station. Moreover, the increased data transmission rate which is obtained via encouraging relays to participate in D2D communications, reduces the latency and increases the residual energy of the devices. Also, using the proposed mobility-aware incentive mechanism, the utility of BS is improved compared to a similar scenario without mobility awareness.