Physical–Social-Aware D2D Content Sharing Networks: A Provider–Demander Matching Game

Device-to-device content sharing is widely considered as an effective response to the prevalence of multimedia content sharing and local services. To ensure its advantages, how to optimally match potential providers to demanders of contents is of importance, especially considering the randomness of content location, as well as the coexistence of altruistic, selfish, and even malicious user behaviors. Accordingly, for such a matching process, it is advisable to achieve a win–win solution, rather than sacrificing performance of either potential providers or demanders. In this work, we employ the weighted directed graph theory to model the two-sided physical–social-aware preferences, which jointly exploit the physical and social networking characteristics of both sides. Then, we study the two-sided physical–social-aware matching problem, which essentially involves the joint issue of pairing scheduling and power control with respect to potential providers and demanders. To solve it in a tractable manner, the former is cast as a two-sided one-to-one matching game, in which the potential providers and demanders rank one another by using the proposed preferences, and the latter is transformed into the preference profile establishment of this matching game. Finally, a distributed algorithm based on the Dinkelbach iteration and deferred acceptance approaches is developed. The properties of the resulting stable outcomes are then studied, and the simulation results verify the availability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.