To Motivate Social Grouping in Wireless Networks

We consider a group of neighboring smartphone users who are roughly at the same time interested in the same network content, while the users can share content enabled by <italic>broadcast</italic> device-to-device communications. As the users are selfish in practice, an <italic>incentive mechanism</italic> is needed to motivate the physically neighboring users to form a <italic>social group</italic>. We propose a novel concept of <italic>equal-reciprocal</italic> incentive over <italic>broadcast</italic> networks, which fairly ensures that each pair of users in the social group share the same amount of content with each other. As the equal-reciprocal incentive may restrict the amount of the shared content, we analyze the <italic>optimal</italic> equal-reciprocal scheme that maximizes the shared content. While ensuring fairness among users, we show that this optimized scheme also maximizes each user’s utility. Finally, we look at <italic>dynamic</italic> content arrivals and extend our incentive scheme successfully by proposing optimal <italic>online</italic> scheduling algorithms that achieve the equal-reciprocal incentive.