Interference-aware resource allocation for device-to-device communications as an underlay using sequential second price auction

An innovative resource allocation scheme is proposed to improve the performance of device-to-device (D2D) communications as an underlay in the downlink (DL) cellular networks. To optimize the system sum rate over the resource sharing of both D2D and cellular modes, we introduce a sequential second price auction as the allocation mechanism. In the auction, all the spectrum resources are considered as a set of resource units, which are auctioned off by groups of D2D pairs in sequence. We first formulate the value of each resource unit for each D2D pair, as a basis of the proposed auction. And then a detailed auction algorithm is explained using a N-ary tree. The equilibrium path of a sequential second price auction is obtained in the auction process, and the state value of the leaf node in the end of the path represents the final allocation. The simulation results show that the proposed auction algorithm leads to a good performance on the system sum rate, efficiency and fairness.