Optimal Wireless Energy Charging for Incentivized Content Transfer in Mobile Publish–Subscribe Networks

In mobile social networks, mobile users may help each other transfer contents when they move and meet each other. In this paper, we consider a mobile publish-subscribe network in which a mobile user (i.e., a content source) incentivizes other users (i.e., messengers) to forward its content by transferring energy to them. The messengers can utilize the received energy for content forwarding and/or their own use. From the perspective of a rational content source, to optimize the content delivery performance, we formulate the problem of energy charging and content transferring as a Markov decision process (MDP): a framework for decision-making in stochastic systems. The objective is to maximize the expected utility in terms of the benefit gained by the content source from delivering the content and cost from energy consumption and transfer. The solution to the MDP is proved to be a threshold policy. Performances of the MDP-based scheme are examined in different system scenarios. The numerical results show that the MDP-based scheme outperforms the conventional baseline schemes.