Game-Theoretic Power Control Mechanisms for Device-to-Device Communications Underlaying Cellular System

Device-to-device (D2D) technology has been extensively studied as an effective means to address the spectrum scarcity and base station overload in cellular system. However, it is a challenging issue to coordinate the mutual interference between a D2D link and a cellular link and between D2D links themselves. Among many techniques in reducing the interference, power control plays a crucial role. While extensive research works have been conducted on D2D power control, most of them assume that all D2D links have the same power level at all time, which is not the case in practice. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic model for the compensation power acquisition of D2D link transmitters underlaying cellular system. This model considers not only the interference between cellular links and D2D links but the interference among D2D links themselves as well. Moreover, it allows the compensation power of a D2D link to be decided based on the need of such a D2D link, leading to reasonable power configurations for all D2D links and an overall improvement in terms of communication quality. As a part of the implementation for the proposed model, we present two (distributed and base station assisted) power control mechanisms where the distributed mechanism includes a detailed algorithm to compute the compensation power for each D2D link. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms are effective and efficient.