Stackelberg-game based distributed energy-aware resource allocation in device-to-device communications

Despite the numerous benefits brought by device-to-device (D2D) communications, user equipments (UEs) are typically handheld devices with limited battery life and can quickly run out of battery if power consumption is ignored in the system design. Compared to previous works that have not taken power consumption into consideration, we model the utility function as a weighted sum of achievable transmission rate, power consumption, and interference revenue (or cost) based on multi-objective optimization (MOO) methods. The resource allocation process is modeled as a two-stage Stackelberg game with transmission power and quality of service (QoS) constraints, in which cellular UEs are game leaders who charges D2D UEs for reusing channels, and D2D UEs are game followers who buy channel resources from cellular UEs. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and how the system parameters affect the pricing and transmission power strategies.