Offloading cellular traffic through opportunistic networks: A Stackelberg-game perspective

摘要

Mobile data offloading has become a promising approach to alleviate cellular traffic load. To motivate the third-party participants to offload data traffic, there arises a variety of market-based incentive frameworks for analyzing economic benefits. However, existing frameworks are mostly oriented to AP-based offloading through WiFi or femtocells, the economic incentive for opportunistic networks to admit cellular data traffic has drawn little attention. In this paper, we develop an incentive framework to analyze the interactions of different players. Specifically, we model the interaction between the data flow (offloading requester) and the mobile user (offloading helper) as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game (MLMF-SG), and investigate the case where the caching space of offloading helper is unlimited. For this case, we establish the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium with respect to the offloading size, and derive the optimal strategy profile by solving a variation of 0-1 knapsack problem. Extensive numerical simulations show that the Stackelberg equilibrium is close to the optimal social utility, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for searching the optimal strategy profile.