Partner-recruitment: Incentive mechanism for content offloading

Cooperative content offloading is a promising technology to lessen heavy burden of wireless networks and improve the quality of downloading services. Since few users are voluntary in providing free assistance, auction-based incentive mechanisms are designed to encourage participation. In existing auction-based incentive mechanisms, each provider only acts as a service seller. However, a provider could also be a partner of the requestor if having interest in the requested content. This dual identity of the provider can improve the quality of its service and cut down the payment of requestor. Based on this observation, we propose an auction-based incentive mechanism named CADRE. To the best of our knowledge, CADRE is the first auction-based incentive mechanism that considers the provider´s dual identity in cooperative content offloading applications. We prove that CADRE possesses attractive characteristics, i.e., truthfulness, lightweight and privacy protection. Besides, we also demonstrate that CADRE outperforms the traditional multi-attribute second-score sealed reverse auction. Our simulation results verify the theoretical analysis.