Contract theory based incentive mechanism design for buffer resource in wireless caching networks

Evidences indicate that,due to the limited caching capacity or inaccurate estimation on users’preferences,the requested files may not be fully cached in the network edge.The transmissions of the un-cached files will also lead to duplicated transmissions on backhaul channels.Buffer-aided relay has been proposed to improve the transmission performance of the un-cached files.Because of the limited buffer capacity and the information asymmetric environment,how to allocate the limited buffer capacity and how to incentivize users in participating buffer-aided relay have become critical issues.In this work,an incentive scheme based on the contract theory is proposed.Specifically,the backlog violation probability,i.e.,the buffer overflow probability,is provided based on the martingale theory.Next,based on the backlog violation probability,the utility functions of the relay node and users are constructed.With the purpose to maximize the utility of the relay node,the optimal contract problem is formulated.Then,the feasibility of the contract is also demonstrated,and the optimal solution can be obtained by the interior point method.Finally,numerical results are presented to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed contract theory scheme.