Cooperative Energy-Efficient Content Dissemination Using Coalition Formation Game Over Device-to-Device Communications

This paper investigates the problem of cooperative energy-efficient content dissemination among a number of cellular user equipments (UEs), with the assumption that these UEs are seeking to receive the same content from a common wireless access point, such as an eNodeB. We formulate the problem as a nontransferable utility coalition formation game, in which a utility function is characterized by taking into consideration energy efficiency and mutual interference in the scenario of proximity device-to-device (D2D) communications. Then, we develop a distributed coalition formation algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, UEs that are in proximity of each other can cooperate and then self-organize into independent disjoint coalitions, and finally minimize overall network energy consumption using D2D communications. The simulation results show that using the proposed algorithm, significant energy savings can be achieved compared with the cellular multicasting case and the noncooperative case, which validates the high energy efficiency of the proposed game-theory-based algorithm in wireless content dissemination scenarios.