Caching in Energy Harvesting Aided Internet of Things: A Game-Theoretic Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) sensing service enables users to monitor the ambient environment by fetching data from IoT sensors. The explosive growth of mobile users and IoT applications injects massive traffic to the IoT network and also speeds up the drainage of sensor batteries. Caching at the IoT gateway (GW), which stores the IoT data and directly send them to the users, can avoid activating sensors too frequently, hence reducing the traffic in the IoT network as well as the energy consumption of sensors. To overcome the limited energy capacity of sensors, energy transmitters (ETs) are deployed to charge them. Practically, the GW and ETs may be owned by different operators, and the GW operator needs to incentivize ETs to provision the charging service. In this paper, we formulate a Stackelberg game in the cache-enabled energy harvesting aided IoT framework to improve the user quality of service. Caching strategies, incentive strategies, and ET transmission power strategies are jointly optimized to find the Stackelberg equilibrium by our proposed alternative direction approach. Simulation results elicit the benefits of our framework and demonstrate the performances of our proposed algorithm.