Two-Timescale Resource Allocation for Cooperative D2D Communication: A Matching Game Approach

In this paper, we consider a cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communication system, where the D2D transmitters (DTs) act as relays to assist the densified cellular network users (CUs) for transmission quality of service (QoS) improvement. The proposed system achieves a win-win situation, i.e. improving the spectrum efficiency of the CUs that cannot meet their rate requirement while providing spectrum access for D2D pairs. Unlike previous works, to reduce the overhead, we design a novel two-timescale resource allocation scheme, in which the pairing between CUs and D2D pairs is decided at a long timescale and transmission time for CU and D2D pair is determined at a short timescale. Specifically, to characterize the long-term payoff of each potential CU-D2D pair, we investigate the optimal cooperation policy to decide the transmission time based on the instantaneous channel state information (CSI). We prove that the optimal policy is a threshold policy which can be achieved via binary search. Since CUs and D2D pairs are self-interested, they are paired only when they agree to cooperate mutually. Therefore, to study the cooperation behaviors of CUs and D2D pairs, we formulate the pairing problem as a matching game, based on the long-term payoff achieved by the optimal cooperation policy of each possible pairing. Furthermore, unlike most previous matching models in D2D networks, we allow transfer between CUs and D2D pairs to improve the performance. To solve the pairing problem, a distributed algorithm is proposed, which converges to an ϵ-stable matching. We show that there is a trade-off between the optimality and the computational complexity of the algorithm. We also analyze the algorithm in terms of the robustness to the unilateral deviation of D2D pairs. Finally, the simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed matching algorithm.