Opportunistic Data Ferrying in UAV-Assisted D2D Networks: A Dynamic Hierarchical Game

In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributed ferrying transmission in UAV-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communication networks. When drones are performing tasks with given trajectories, terrestrial communication devices can select them for loading data opportunistically, and then drones will offload the data to corresponding receivers in the appropriate later time. For the dynamic multi-device network, there are composite optimization problems including competition of drone selection, time allocation of data loading and offloading, as well as limited channel access. Due to the distributed feature, devices share resources through independent perception and decision making. Therefore, a dynamic hierarchical game is designed for the problem of joint UAV allocation and channel access. Specifically, a predictable dynamic matching market is constructed to address the problem of UAV selection and time allocation, while the problem of channel access is studied by the congestion game. Based on the game model, a distributed hierarchical algorithm is proposed and the property of convergence is discussed. Simulation results confirm that the effective selection of data ferrying approach can improve the transmission performance significantly, while unreasonable optimization approaches may lead to the decline of the transmission performance.