Rating-aware Pre-cache and Incentive Mechanism Design in Data Offloading

Pre-caching popular contents in advance at the network edge such as base stations is a promising method to improve the service quality by reducing the transmission cost and network congestion. In this paper, by jointly considering the mobile users’ rating on different contents into the incentive mechanism design, we proposed a rating-aware incentive mechanism for efficiently selecting some BSs to pre-cache the popular contents. The proposed mechanism can achieve higher performance compared with other existing methods in terms of the social welfare. In specific, the proposed mechanism can improve the achieved social welfare by 11.75% and 9.97% compared with the mechanism of random caching and the caching based on bid price, respectively. In addition, the proposed mechanism satisfies the nice properties of individual rationality and truthfulness.