To Motivate Social Grouping in Wireless Networks

Abstract: We consider a group of neighboring smartphone users who are roughly at the same time interested in the same network content, called common interests. However, ever-increasing data traffic challenges the limited capacity of base-stations (BSs) in wireless networks. To better utilize the limited BSs' resources under unreliable wireless networks, we propose local common-interests sharing (enabled by D2D communications) by motivating the physically neighboring users to form a social group. As users are selfish in practice, an incentive mechanism is needed to motivate social grouping. We propose a novel concept of equal-reciprocal incentive over broadcast communications, which fairly ensures that each pair of the users in the social group share the same amount of content with each other. As the equal-reciprocal incentive may restrict the amount of content shared among the users, we analyze the optimal equal-reciprocal scheme that maximizes local sharing content. While ensuring fairness among users, we show that this optimized scheme also maximizes each user's utility in the social group. Finally, we look at dynamic content arrivals and extend our scheme successfully by proposing novel on-line scheduling algorithms.