A Sequential Posted Price Mechanism for D2D Content Sharing Communications

Abstract

In this paper, the incentive mechanism design issue for device-to-device (D2D) content-sharing communications is discussed. In literature, most of works are based on auction/game theory, where all content owners first report their ask prices/costs towards the base station (BS) which finally decides only one winner from them to transmit data towards the content requester. One disadvantage of these works is that content owners may be frequently activated to provide auction/game information (such as prices/costs), leading to high energy consumption, but finally may not win to gain benefit. To address this, we propose a sequential posted price mechanism where the BS sends offers with posted prices to content owners in sequence and activates only one owner each time. The BS stops sending new offers as long as there is already an owner accepting an offer or when the BS finds the expected cost of sending a new offer is larger than the cost of direct transmission. The optimal posted prices and offer- stopping rule of the BS are derived by the backward principle of dynamic programming. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively limit the proportion of content owners being activated while the BS maintains an acceptable expected cost.