Joint mode selection and resource allocation for machine-type D2D links

Low-power machine-type communications devices in machine-to-machine networks are expected to operate autonomously for years, or even decades. Meanwhile, device-to-device (D2D) communications make large benefits on users’ data rate and power consumption because of the proximity between potential D2D transmitters and receivers. In this paper, we facilitate machine-type D2D links where the machine-type communications devices are connected to a nearby device, such as a number of sensors connected to a gateway that acts as the relay towards the evolved NodeB. A challenging problem is the co-channel interference caused by spectrum sharing between underlaying machine-type D2D links and traditional cellular user equipments (CUEs). Therefore, we consider joint mode selection, radio resource allocation and power control to improve overall system data rate and reduce average traffic delay. We first formulate a problem to maximise the sum of users’ utilities with signal-to-interference-plus-noise and power constraints for both D2D links and CUEs. Furthermore, we adopt the coalition formation game with transferable utility to solve the formulated problem. In the game model, the D2D links and CUEs that share the same resource block pair form a coalition, and the coalition formation decisions are determined by the best-reply rule. In addition, ‘experimentation’ is introduced in the coalition formation process to improve the effectiveness of the final coalition structure. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the scheme with heuristic greedy algorithm in terms of overall system throughput, average traffic delay and users’ fairness. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence J. Zhao, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Received 29 June 2015; Revised 30 September 2015; Accepted 19 October 2015