Joint Mode Selection and Radio Resource Allocation for D2D Communications Based on Dynamic Coalition Formation Game

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication makes large benefit on users’ data rate due to the proximity between potential D2D transmitters and receivers. However, the data rate is restricted by the co-channel interference between underlaying D2D links and traditional cellular users (CUs). In this paper, we investigate how to leverage D2D communication to improve overall system data rate via joint mode selection and radio resource allocation. We first formulate a problem to maximize the sum of users’ data rate with interference and power constraints for both D2D links and CUs. Furthermore, we adopt the coalition formation game with transferable utility (TU) to solve the formulated problem. In the game model, the D2D links and CUs that share the same Resource Block (RB) form a coalition and the coalition formation decisions are determined by a best-reply rule. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the scheme with heuristic greedy algorithm in terms of average users’ data rate and fairness. Keywords—Device-to-device (D2D), coalition formation game, transferable utility (TU), mode selection, resource allocation, data rate, fairness.