Deep reinforcement learning-based incentive mechanism design for short video sharing through D2D communication

With the development of 5th generation (5G) wireless communication networks and the popularity of short video applications, there has been a rapid increase in short video traffic in cellular networks. Device-to-device (D2D) communication-based short video sharing is considered to be an effective way to offload traffic from cellular networks. Due to the selfish nature of mobile user equipment (MUEs), how to dynamically motivate MUEs to engage in short video sharing while ensuring the Quality of Service, which makes it critical to design an appropriate incentive mechanism. In this paper, we firstly analyze the rationale for dynamically setting rewards and penalties and then define the rewards and penalties setting dynamically for maximizing the utility of the mobile edge computing server (RPSDMU) problem. The problem is proved NP-hard. Furthermore, we formulate the dynamic incentive process as the Markov Decision Process problem. Considering the complexity and dynamics of the problem, we design a Dynamic Incentive Mechanism algorithm of D2D-based Short Video Sharing based on Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (DIM-A3C) to solve the problem. Simulation results show that the proposed dynamic incentive mechanism can increase the utility of mobile edge computing server by an average of 22% and 16% compared with the existing proportional incentive mechanism (PIM) and scoring-based incentive mechanism (SIM). Meanwhile, DIM-A3C achieves a higher degree of satisfaction than PIM and SIM.