Joint channel allocation and power control for underlay D2D transmission

We study a joint channel allocation and power control problem for device-to-device (D2D) transmission underlaying a conventional single-cell cellular network. In such networks, direct transmissions are allowed among device pairs with local needs, provided that the adverse effects of D2D communications on cellular users is negligible and cellular users are given the priority in using limited wireless resources. Moreover, as D2D users are not in contact with the base station (BS), providing them with channel and/or network knowledge imposes excessive overhead. As a result, it becomes imperative to seek for new resource management mechanisms that fit the limitations of this concept. In this paper we consider a realistic model with respect to the information availability, and propose a joint channel allocation and power control scheme by using game- and graph theory. In particular, we first decompose the resource management problem into two cascaded channel allocation and power control problems, by proving a lower bound on the aggregate utility of cellular users. Afterwards we propose a centralized graph-theoretical channel allocation approach jointly for D2D and cellular users. Given the channel allocation, the subsequent power control problem is modeled as a game with incomplete information. We analyze the characteristics of this game and solve it in a distributed manner, by using a multi-agent Q-learning strategy. We evaluate the proposed resource allocation scheme both analytically and numerically.