Overlapping Coalition Formation Game for Resource Allocation in Network Coding Aided D2D Communications

Due to spectrum sharing, device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks enhance system capacity significantly that benefits services of local area. On the other hand, network coding enables highly efficient cooperation, which increases the system capacity through code-and-forward mechanism. It is a challenging problem that how to allocate resource in the network coding aided cooperative D2D communications. In this paper, we first design a network coding aided cooperative diversity scheme for D2D communication, and derive the system transmission rate with the consideration of interference. Then, we formulate the problem of joint spectrum resource allocation and relay selection as an overlapping coalition formation game, where one relay is able to serve multiple coalitions to increase the system capacity. For each coalition, maximum bipartite graph matching model is established to select the optimal relay to achieve the maximum transmission rate. Finally, to solve the formulated game problem, we propose a distributed algorithm based on switch operations with low computation complexity. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that our solution increases the system transmission rate by about 30-40 percent without bringing extra computation complexity, compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.