Resource allocation for intercell device-to-device communication underlaying cellular network: A game-theoretic approach

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is envisioned as a promising technology to significantly improve the performance of current cellular infrastructures. Allocating resources to the D2D link, however, raises an enormous challenge to the co-existing D2D and cellular communications due to mutual interference. While there have been many resource allocation solutions proposed for D2D underlaying cellular network, they have primarily focused on the intracell scenario while leaving the intercell settings untouched. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem for intercell D2D communications underlaying cellular networks, where D2D link is located in the overlapping area of two neighboring cells. We present three inter-cell D2D scenarios regarding the resource allocation problem. To address this problem, we develop a repeated game model under these scenarios. Distinct from existing works, we characterize the communication infrastructure, namely Base Stations (BSs), as players competing resource allocation quota for D2D demand, and define the utility of each player as the payoff from both cellular and D2D communications using radio resources. We also propose a resource allocation algorithm and protocol based on the equilibrium derivations. Numerical results indicate that the developed model not only significantly enhances the system performance including sum rate and sum rate gain, but also sheds lights on resource configurations for intercell D2D scenarios.