Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting-Based Device-to-Device Communication

In this paper, we address the downlink resource (subcarriers and power jointly) allocation problem for energy harvesting-based device-to-device communication in a railway carriage communication network to improve the energy efficiency (EE) of the system. The considered problem is formulated as maximizing the weighted EE and is solved by leveraging a game-theoretic learning approach. Specifically, we first propose a new performance metric for evaluating the EE and optimize its lower bound. However, there exists an intractable issue of mixing the integer nature into the feasible region. To this end, we decompose the optimization problem into two subproblems by fixing the sub-carrier and power allocations alternately. These two subproblems are formulated as two exact potential games, and the optimal properties of their solutions are analyzed. Accordingly, we respectively design a virtual distributed learning algorithm for the power control to find the optimum solution, i.e., Nash equilibrium (NE) point, based on the derived conditions of the uniqueness of NE, which can effectively accelerate convergence, and a fully distributed Max-logit algorithm for the subcarrier allocations to obtain the best NE with an arbitrarily high probability in which only local information needs to be exchanged. Through the alternation of two algorithms and iterative operation, the optimal solution to the problem is achieved. Finally, numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.