Banket: Bandwidth Market for Building a Sharing Economy in Mobile Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is expected to be a promising solution in next generation cellular technologies to efficiently provide connectivity over a wide area at low cost. However, autonomous D2D communication introduces challenging technical issues, and how to achieve the benefit and cooperation of users is an unsolved issue. To address this problem, we propose a novel concept of a bandwidth market called Banket for building a sharing economy in mobile networks. It provides an auction-based free marketplace for mobile users to buy and sell mobile bandwidth without cooperation with network operators. The contribution of the proposed Banket is to achieve dynamic and complete autonomous D2D communication established by market mechanisms without intervention. Banket prompts users to efficiently use network resources, and consequently achieves cost reduction for network operators and social profit by reducing resource and energy consumption. The validity of the proposed auction-based transaction scheme is confirmed through computer simulations. Furthermore, the feasibility of Banket is validated with experimental results using implemented applications.