834 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 68, NO. 1, JANUARY 2019
assume that all UEs are rational and motivated as helpers in the
participation of mobile content downloading by using some ex-
isting micropayment schemes [14]–[16]. Also, we suppose that
the role of an user acting as a helper or receiver does not change
during the current content downloading, and it may shift in the
downloading of another content since some previous receivers
may not request the content while some helpers may request it
now. In Fig. 1, there are currently 4 receivers named as r
1
, r
2
,
r
3
and r
4
, and 6 helpers called h
1
, h
2
, h
3
, h
4
, h
5
and h
6
.
To sum up, there exist three transmission modes in the envis-
aged D2D-based offloading as follows. 1) Direct cellular trans-
mission: a receiver directly obtains its requested content from
BSs, which also happens between BSs and helpers for relaying
as well as offloading. For example, in Fig. 1, both receiver r
1
and helper h
2
obtain the content from cellular BS b
1
directly
in frame l
t
. 2) Connected D2D transmission: the receiver ac-
quires its requested content through a connected path from BSs,
consisting of one or more helpers in its coverage. As depicted
in Fig. 1, in frame l
t+ 1
, r
1
obtains the content from b
1
through
a connected D2D path b
1
→ h
1
→ h
2
→ r
1
. 3) Opportunistic
D2D transmission: a helper stores the downloaded content in its
buffer, and then transmits the content to the receivers or other
helpers in future frames. In Fig. 1, h
5
receives the content from
BS b
2
in frame l
t
, and then receiver r
3
downloads the content
from h
5
in frame l
t+ 1
, which actually forms an opportunistic
D2D path b
2
→ h
5
→ r
3
. Note that according to our definition
of frame, any UE’s location and its access relationship is fixed
within a frame, which implies that any established D2D link or
cellular link will not be interrupted during the frame. And it may
be disconnected or maintained at the next frame according to
both the status of the D2D UEs and the order of the cellular BSs.
The traditional D2D technologies are inadequate for the con-
sidered mobile content downloading system, since they are
based on WiFi and Bluetooth that work at 2.4 GHz unlicensed
band [17]. Therefore, following [17], [23], we focus on the
operator controlled D2D communication underlaying cellular
networks, where the D2D UEs use the same licensed band of
cellular BS under the full control of the cellular network. The
main advantage of this kind of D2D lies in that, the devices
can communicate directly with each other under the control of
the cellular network, including resource allocation, access au-
thentication, and connection control [17], [23]. In other words,
with this kind of D2D, the operator can control the communica-
tion process to provide better QoS and make profit accordingly,
which suits for the problem of maximizing offloading efficiency
with throughput guarantee. Besides, since this kind of D2D
communications consumes part of the orthogonal spectrum re-
sources assigned to the cellular networks, it does not interfere
with the cellular communications. However, there may exist in-
terference between two D2D communication pairs, as all D2D
communications in the same cellular coverage work on the same
frequency, to reuse the spectrum resources. Following [23], [25],
we employ the IEEE 802.11 based MAC protocol to effectively
allocate the shared spectrum bandwidth for D2D communica-
tions. The main advantage of this kind of MAC protocol is
that, based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC, the nodes in the same
access domain are strictly not allowed to transmit simultane-
ously to avoid collision or interference. This perfectly matches
the “operator controlled D2D” underlaying cellular networks
we considered in this paper, as the establishment as well as
disconnection of all D2D links can be controlled by the cellular.
Thus, the interference between D2D communications can be
reasonably managed.
B. Problem Statement
In this study, we strive to maximize the offloading efficiency
via D2D while taking into account the minimum throughput re-
quirement of receivers, limited buffer size of helpers and other
system constraints. The system constraints mainly include the
constraints of flow conservation, interference, and spectrum al-
location. To achieve the objective, UEs are expected to partici-
pate in more opportunistic D2D transmissions, which requires
us to capture all the potential D2D opportunities. In Section III,
based on the knowledge of UEs’ mobility trajectories and de-
ployment of BSs, we first build a spatial-temporal dynamic
graph to model the transmission evolution in the dynamic
D2D-based offloading, which captures all the possible transmis-
sion opportunities during the content downloading duration. In
Section IV, based on the graph, we mathematically derive the
objective function as well as other involved system constraints.
III. S
PATIA L-TEMPORAL DYNAMIC GRAPH MODELING FOR
D2D-BASED OFFLOADING
Now, we employ the dynamic graph modeling method [18],
[19] to model the D2D-based offloading process in mobile con-
tent downloading. Specifically, we construct a spatial-temporal
dynamic graph (STDG) to capture all possible transmission op-
portunities of the aforementioned three different transmission
modes evolving in time. Assume that there are B cellular BSs
and U mobile UEs in the network. The sets of BSs and UEs are
denoted by B = {b
1
,b
2
, ..., b
B
} and U = R
H, respectively,
where R = {r
1
,r
2
, ..., r
R
} and H = {h
1
,h
2
, ..., h
H
} represent
the receiver set and helper set, respectively. For convenience, U
is also denoted as {u
1
,u
2
, ..., u
U
} to represent all UEs.
To describe the UEs’ time-varying communication opportu-
nities as well as their dynamic accessing relationships with the
BSs, we build the STDG, which is a time-expanded graph, based
on the UEs’ mobility trace and BSs’ deployment. To generate
the STDG, we first need to identify the communication con-
tact events between any pair of nodes, including BS and UE,
helper and helper, and helper and receiver. The contact events
can be categorized into the four types as follows. 1) Cellular link
starts: the time when an UE establishes a cellular link with a BS;
2) cellular link ends: the time when an UE disconnects a cellular
link with a BS; 3) D2D link starts: the time when two neighbor-
ing UEs establish a D2D link; 4) D2D link ends: the time when
two UEs that have been in the D2D communication state break
the established D2D link.
According to the above communication contact events, which
sequentially occur at the different time τ
0
,τ
1
, ..., τ
T
, we parti-
tion the system time into several sequential frames l
0
,l
1
, ..., l
T
,
where l
t
is defined as the time duration between τ
t−1
and τ
t
,
t = 1, ..., T , and l
0
is defined as the time before τ
0
. Based on the
definition of the frame, none of the four contact events occurs
during each frame. In other words, both the states of the cellular
BSs and UEs and the communication links remain unchanged
within each frame; otherwise, the system transforms into the
next frame. We also use t to denote the frame l
t
for brevity in
the rest of the paper.