A Resource Sharing Scheme for Intercell D2D Communication in Cellular Networks: A Repeated Game Theoretic Approach

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is an emerging IoT technology for improved performance of cellular networks in terms of aspects like spectral efficiency, battery lifetime, coverage range. The 5G cellular network is supposed to provide a perception of 99.999% network availability. One of the approaches to obtain it is by intercell D2D communication that eliminates the issue of unavailability of bandwidth between two users connected with different base stations (BSs). The interference mitigation is a key challenge while using licensed cellular spectrum for D2D links. It is seen that the resource allocation to the D2D links is a complex problem when D2D pairs are connected with different base stations. This paper presents a dynamic Resource-Block (RB) sharing scheme between the D2D users and cellular users in a multi-cell cellular network. Here a D2D user pair plays a Repeated Game with the nearby base stations in such a way that the players share a subset of their initial allotted resource to maximize their utility. The game is played by every intercell D2D player with the base stations simultaneously. We show that the punishment period of a deviating player may be reduced by invoking an additional penalty factor for its fast adherence. In addition, we also compute the optimal number of initial orthogonal RBs that is allocated to the D2D and the cellular users. Evaluation of our proposed scheme in comparison to few well known existing techniques shows a marked improvement in throughput of the overall system.