Movement-based incentive for cellular traffic offloading through D2D communications

Due to the various applications for smartphones, mobile data traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate. The cellular network is suffering from traffic overloaded currently. Offloading part of the cellular traffic through opportunistic contact between mobile devices is a promising solution to solve the overload problem. However, due to the uneven distribution of devices and regular mobility of smartphone users, the contacts between mobile devices are opportunistic, the cellular traffic offloading approach results in poor performance, i.e., the relay user contacts with other mobile users with small probability. In this paper, we are the first to propose a movement-based incentive mechanism for cellular traffic offloading, where we control the mobility of relay users to improve the performance of traffic offloading. The movement-based incentive mechanism contains a relay user selection algorithm and a payment determination algorithm. Comparing with existing solutions, our proposed movement-based incentive mechanism has better performance.