GALLERY: A Game-Theoretic Resource Allocation Scheme for Multicell Device-to-Device Communications Underlaying Cellular Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has recently emerged as a promising technology to improve the capacity and coverage of cellular systems. Coordinating interference between D2D and cellular users plays a crucial role in realizing D2D communications underlaying cellular networks successfully. While most of prior mechanisms for D2D have focused on mitigating interference within a single-cell system, they fail to address intercell interference with multiple cell settings. In this paper, we investigate the intercell interference issue in a cellular network where a D2D link reuses the available spectrum resources of multiple cells. We propose a game-theoretic resource allocation scheme, termed GALLERY, to address this problem. Unlike existing works that typically treat D2D users as players, we characterize base stations (BSs) as players competing for resources allocation quota of D2D demand, and define the utility of each player as the payoff gained from both cellular and D2D. We also propose a resource allocation protocol based on the equilibrium derivation. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the proposed scheme and the results show that it can considerably enhance the system performance in terms of sum rate and sum rate gain. It is expected that GALLERY provides systematical insights into resource configurations of multiple cells for D2D communications.