Game Theoretic Multihop D2D Content Sharing: Joint Participants Selection, Routing, and Pricing

Device-to-device (D2D) content sharing holds great promise to alleviate the growing strain on cellular networks, as it offloads popular content data onto direct peer-to-peer links. However, it is still unexplored how content sharing could benefit from utilizing multihop rather than the conventional single-hop D2D communications. As a step towards this end, this paper proposes a game theoretic approach to enable D2D content sharing with multihop communication capabilities. Given a subset of participants, a Nash bargaining game is modeled to provide the routing and pricing graphs, where a novel incentive mechanism is adopted to stimulate cooperation. By iteratively evaluating the solution of the Nash bargaining subgame, participants that include content sources and transmission relays are determined, which ensures that all participants make contributions to the content sharing process. An additional procedure termed pricing plan is introduced to make sure that the final pricing graph is practical and feasible in terms of D2D communication. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed game theoretic approach could not only jointly deal with the participants selection, routing, and pricing problems in multihop D2D content sharing, but also effectively restrict utilities and transmission resources to only contributive participants.