Coalitional Games for Resource Allocation in the Device-to-Device Uplink Underlaying Cellular Networks

With emergency of demands for local area services, device-to-device (D2D) communication is proposed as a vital technology component for the next generation cellular communication system to improve spectral reuse and enhance system capacity. These benefits depend on efficient interference management and resource allocation. Existing works usually consider these problems under a restricted cellular system consisting of a pair of D2D users and a cellular user. In this paper, we address the uplink resource allocation problem for multiple D2D and cellular users from a game theory point of view. Combing different transmission modes, mutual interferences, and resource sharing policy in a single utility function, we propose a coalition formation game based scheme. By theoretical analysis, we prove that it converges to Nash-stable equilibrium and further approaches to the system optimal solution with geometric rate. By extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, which achieves the close optimum solution obtained by the centralized exhaustive algorithm and enhances the system sum rate by about 20%-65% without sacrifice of resource sharing fairness compared with several other practical strategies.