A Fairness-Based Collaborative Communication Ecosystem Over Sustainable D2D Fogs in a 5G Industrial IoT

In a 5G industrial IoT, using fog devices (FD) to release the burden of transmission data between a base station (BS) and a register user, is currently a promising method for device-to-device (D2D) communications. In this article, we propose a collaborative communication ecosystem to deploy RF-powered FDs as intermediaries to improve the utility as well as the fairness. We examine three contributing works that activate a relay-labor exchanging market. First, we build Stackelberg games to attract D2D collaborations; second, we employ an energy harvest technology and a time-switching power scheme to make exchange benefits to support the games; third, to reduce the relay redundancy and guarantee effective transmission rates, we employ network-coded flows. To solve the double-objects optimization model of our collaborative games, a genetic algorithm NSGA-II is applied to find an optimal solution to the market. We also mathematically prove the existence of an equilibrium state in the proposed games, and afterwards simulate the whole scenario using Mininet for a performance analysis. The simulation results in Mininet show that the BS and FDs in the market games all achieve desirable utilities as well as fairness among FDs.