Social aware joint link and power allocation for D2D communication underlaying cellular networks

Joint link and power allocation for device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks are necessary to coordinate the mutual interference. Most of the works consider the sum interference from D2D pairs. However, mobile devices are carried by human beings who are connected with social ties. For one cellular user, the strengths of the social ties with D2D pairs are different. Thus, his interference tolerance temperatures (ITTs) are various. In this study, we distinguish D2D pairs through the social ties, and propose a social aware pricing-based joint link and power allocation scheme. Specifically, the base station (BS) prices the interference on every link and updates the prices according to the ITTs of cellular users. Subsequently, with the prices, the competition of D2D pairs for the links is modelled as a non-cooperative game. The authors prove the existence and the uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium (NE), and demonstrate that the NE is Pareto optimal. Moreover, an iterative decentralised algorithm is designed to solve the game. Especially, if the number of the price on one link for one D2D pair being updated is up to an upper bound, the power is forced to be 0. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the authors' proposed scheme.