Incentive mechanisms for promoting D2D communications in cellular networks

Recently, device-to-device (D2D) communications have been proposed for efficient utilisation of resources of cellular networks by offloading some traffic of base station (BS) to direct links between user equipments (UEs), i.e., cellular users. While there are many works on optimisation of resources sharing in D2D communications in cellular networks, a little works has been done to promote D2D communications and attract users to adopt and take part in it. In this paper, in order to encourage users to adopt D2D communications, we present users achievable data rate both in D2D link and cellular link when they ask base station (BS) for contents. If the data rate in D2D link is less than cellular link, users will ask for reward for taking part in D2D communications. We also present how much reward will be awarded for taking part in D2D communications. By simulation, we show the percentage of users asking for rewards and the amount of reward they ask for taking part in D2D communications under various scenarios. The simulation results show that all users do not ask reward and may wilfully take part in D2D communications without reward.