Scalable and Fair Resource Sharing Among 5G D2D Users and Legacy 4G Users: A Game Theoretic Approach

We propose a game theoretic approach to the problem of resource allocation in 5G device to device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks, where modern 5G D2D users (DUs) share channel resources of legacy 4G cellular users (CUs). Though such sharing improves scalability as more and more users can be served, the individual throughput obtained by a CU may get reduced when its channel resource is shared by a DU pair. Thus our aim is to increase the overall system throughput while ensuring effective user fairness among the DUs and CUs served. Our approach provides a tradeoff between the two objectives thereby ensuring no legacy CUs are compromised heavily while encouraging modern DUs. We have addressed this fairness problem by thresholding the reduction of the throughput of a CU with respect to its ideal throughput if not reused. We have proposed a game theoretic model in order to make strategic decision for selecting the preferred action configuration in order to meet this objective. Together with this game model and a validation process, we aim to improve scalability, overall system throughput without compromising on the fairness of the users. We have also compared the user fairness achieved by our approach with an existing approach to demonstrate the effectiveness of our game theoretic approach.