Game theory-based smart mobile-data offloading scheme in 5G cellular networks

Abstract

Mobile-data traffic exponentially increases day by day due to the rapid development of smart devices and mobile internet services. Thus, the cellular network suffers from various problems, like traffic congestion and load imbalance, which might decrease end-user quality of service. This work compensates for the problem of offloading in the cellular network by forming device-to-device (D2D) links. A game scenario is formulated where D2D-link pairs compete for network resources. In a D2D-link pair, the data of a user equipment (UE) is offloaded to another UE with an offload coefficient, i.e., the proportion of requested data that can be delivered via D2D links. Each link acts as a player in a cooperative game, with the optimal solution for the game found using the Nash bargaining solution (NBS). The proposed solution aims to present a strategy to control different parameters of the UE, including harvested energy which is stored in a rechargeable battery with a finite capacity and the offload coefficients of the D2D-link pairs, to optimize the performance of the network in terms of throughput and energy efficiency (EE) while considering fairness among links in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed game scheme can effectively offload mobile data, achieve better EE and improve the throughput while maintaining high fairness, compared to an offloading scheme based on a maximized fairness index (MFI) and to a no-offload scheme.