Energy Efficient Two-hop D2D Communications Underlay 5G Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Although coverage and capacity are the key elements of the 5G user experience, a dominant part of the population living in rural areas still experience inferior connectivity. Several solutions have been proposed to address this issue. They include deploying small cells, increasing the number of sectors per eNodeB, and reusing signal repetition. However, most of them require complex deployment and expensive fees. Accordingly, many efforts have been deployed on coverage extension software. Even so, many critical issues related to public safety, relay capacity, and devices power constraints are still challenging. As a contribution, we propose in this paper a spectral and energy-efficient two-hop device to device (D2D) relay selection algorithm. Our main goal is to extend the connectivity to the out-of-coverage (OOC) devices. Contrarily to previous solutions in which the relay is selected centrally or individually, we propose a distributed two-stage algorithm based on the Stackelberg game to involve all the competing devices. In the first stage, the OOC devices (OCDUs) are matched with the relays maximizing their spectral efficiency, and the required bandwidth for each one is determined. Then, a power control stage is investigated to calculate the optimal transmission power. The numerical and simulation analysis shows that the proposed schema outperforms the former solutions in total system capacity, spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency (EE) while reducing the complexity

Review on Radio Resource Allocation Optimization in LTE/LTE-Advanced using Game Theory

Recently, there has been a growing trend toward ap-plying game theory (GT) to various engineering fields in order to solve optimization problems with different competing entities/con-tributors/players. Researches in the fourth generation (4G) wireless network field also exploited this advanced theory to overcome long term evolution (LTE) challenges such as resource allocation, which is one of the most important research topics. In fact, an efficient de-sign of resource allocation schemes is the key to higher performance. However, the standard does not specify the optimization approach to execute the radio resource management and therefore it was left open for studies. This paper presents a survey of the existing game theory based solution for 4G-LTE radio resource allocation problem and its optimization

Relaying in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

The deployment of relays between Internet of Things (IoT) end devices and gateways can improve link quality. In cellular-based IoT, relays have the potential to reduce base station overload. The energy expended in single-hop long-range communication can be reduced if relays listen to transmissions of end devices and forward these observations to gateways. However, incorporating relays into IoT networks faces some challenges. IoT end devices are designed primarily for uplink communication of small-sized observations toward the network; hence, opportunistically using end devices as relays needs a redesign of both the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol of such end devices and possible addition of new communication interfaces. Additionally, the wake-up time of IoT end devices needs to be synchronized with that of the relays. For cellular-based IoT, the possibility of using infrastructure relays exists, and noncellular IoT networks can leverage the presence of mobile devices for relaying, for example, in remote healthcare. However, the latter presents problems of incentivizing relay participation and managing the mobility of relays. Furthermore, although relays can increase the lifetime of IoT networks, deploying relays implies the need for additional batteries to power them. This can erode the energy efficiency gain that relays offer. Therefore, designing relay-assisted IoT networks that provide acceptable trade-offs is key, and this goes beyond adding an extra transmit RF chain to a relay-enabled IoT end device. There has been increasing research interest in IoT relaying, as demonstrated in the available literature. Works that consider these issues are surveyed in this paper to provide insight into the state of the art, provide design insights for network designers and motivate future research directions

Relay assisted device-to-device communication with channel uncertainty

The gains of direct communication between user equipment in a network may not be fully realised due to the separation between the user equipment and due to the fading that the channel between these user equipment experiences. In order to fully realise the gains that direct (device-to-device) communication promises, idle user equipment can be exploited to serve as relays to enforce device-to-device communication. The availability of potential relay user equipment creates a problem: a way to select the relay user equipment. Moreover, unlike infrastructure relays, user equipment are carried around by people and these users are self-interested. Thus the problem of relay selection goes beyond choosing which device to assist in relayed communication but catering for user self-interest. Another problem in wireless communication is the unavailability of perfect channel state information. This reality creates uncertainty in the channel and so in designing selection algorithms, channel uncertainty awareness needs to be a consideration. Therefore the work in this thesis considers the design of relay user equipment selection algorithms that are not only device centric but that are relay user equipment centric. Furthermore, the designed algorithms are channel uncertainty aware. Firstly, a stable matching based relay user equipment selection algorithm is put forward for underlay device-to-device communication. A channel uncertainty aware approach is proposed to cater to imperfect channel state information at the devices. The algorithm is combined with a rate based mode selection algorithm. Next, to cater to the queue state at the relay user equipment, a cross-layer selection algorithm is proposed for a twoway decode and forward relay set up. The algorithm proposed employs deterministic uncertainty constraint in the interference channel, solving the selection algorithm in a heuristic fashion. Then a cluster head selection algorithm is proposed for device-to-device group communication constrained by channel uncertainty in the interference channel. The formulated rate maximization problem is solved for deterministic and probabilistic constraint scenarios, and the problem extended to a multiple-input single-out scenario for which robust beamforming was designed. Finally, relay utility and social distance based selection algorithms are proposed for full duplex decode and forward device-to-device communication set up. A worst-case approach is proposed for a full channel uncertainty scenario. The results from computer simulations indicate that the proposed algorithms offer spectral efficiency, fairness and energy efficiency gains. The results also showed clearly the deterioration in the performance of networks when perfect channel state information is assumed

Energy-Efficient Matching for Resource Allocation in D2D Enabled Cellular Networks

Energy-efficiency (EE) is critical for device-to-device (D2D) enabled cellular networks due to limited battery capacity and severe co-channel interference. In this paper, we address the EE optimization problem by adopting a stable matching approach. The NP-hard joint resource allocation problem is formulated as a one-to-one matching problem under two-sided preferences, which vary dynamically with channel states and interference levels. A game-theoretic approach is employed to analyze the interactions and correlations among user equipments (UEs), and an iterative power allocation algorithm is developed to establish mutual preferences based on nonlinear fractional programming. We then employ the Gale-Shapley (GS) algorithm to match D2D pairs with cellular UEs (CUs), which is proved to be stable and weak Pareto optimal. We provide a theoretical analysis and description for implementation details and algorithmic complexity. We also extend the algorithm to address scalability issues in large-scale networks by developing tie-breaking and preference deletion based matching rules. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that significant performance gains of average EE and matching satisfactions can be achieved by the proposed algorithm

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in Device-to-Device Underlay Communications

Despite the numerous benefits brought by Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, the introduction of D2D into cellular networks poses many new challenges in the resource allocation design due to the co-channel interference caused by spectrum reuse and limited battery life of User Equipments (UEs). Most of the previous studies mainly focus on how to maximize the Spectral Efficiency (SE) and ignore the energy consumption of UEs. In this paper, we study how to maximize each UE's Energy Efficiency (EE) in an interference-limited environment subject to its specific Quality of Service (QoS) and maximum transmission power constraints. We model the resource allocation problem as a noncooperative game, in which each player is self-interested and wants to maximize its own EE. A distributed interference-aware energy-efficient resource allocation algorithm is proposed by exploiting the properties of the nonlinear fractional programming. We prove that the optimum solution obtained by the proposed algorithm is the Nash equilibrium of the noncooperative game. We also analyze the tradeoff between EE and SE and derive closed-form expressions for EE and SE gaps.Comment: submitted to IET Communications. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1405.1963, arXiv:1407.155