On Consideration of Content Preference and Sharing Willingness in D2D Assisted Offloading

TL;DR

This paper investigates optimal content pushing strategies in D2D offloading by considering user content preferences and sharing willingness, proposing solutions for special and general cases, and demonstrating improved offloading performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization framework for content pushing in D2D offloading that accounts for human factors like preferences and willingness, including a closed-form solution and an iterative algorithm.

Findings

Optimal pushing strategies depend more on sharing willingness than group size.

The AGO algorithm effectively solves the general optimization problem.

High sharing willingness users should be prioritized for content pushing.

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) assisted offloading heavily depends on the participation of human users. The content preference and sharing willingness of human users are two crucial factors in the D2D assisted offloading. In this paper, with consideration of these two factors, the optimal content pushing strategy is investigated by formulating an optimization problem to maximize the offloading gain measured by the offloaded traffic. Users are placed into groups according to their content preferences, and share content with intergroup and intragroup users at different sharing probabilities. Although the optimization problem is nonconvex, the closed-form optimal solution for a special case is obtained, when the sharing probabilities for intergroup and intragroup users are the same. Furthermore, an alternative group optimization (AGO) algorithm is proposed to solve the general case of the optimization problem. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the offloading performance achieved by the optimal pushing strategy for the special case and AGO algorithm. An interesting conclusion drawn is that the group with the largest number of interested users is not necessarily given the highest pushing probability. It is more important to give high pushing probability to users with high sharing willingness.