Resource Allocation in D2D Enabled Vehicular Communications: A Robust Stackelberg Game Approach Based on Price-Penalty Mechanism

This paper studies how to apply game theory to realize a well-function device-to-device enabled vehicular (D2D-V) communication system, where the uplink channel allocated to the cellular user (CU) is reused by multiple D2D-V users. Considering a non-cooperative setting where the CU and D2D-V users are selfish and profit-driven, a novel Stackelberg game framework is proposed to model the single-leader-multiple-follower hierarchical competition, where the CU and D2D-V users act as the leader and the followers, respectively. For the current D2D-V networks, the interference in the dense vehicle scene often leads to extremely poor communication quality. Moreover, a vehicle's mobility leads to an uncertain channel state and further affects the stability of communication. To achieve effective communication, robust Stackelberg game-based resource allocation is developed, and a price-penalty mechanism is further proposed. Unlike previous Stackelberg games, the robust game is highlighted by handling the channel uncertainty which is embedded in the interference probability constraints. Besides, a game equilibrium (GE) is considered to be the solution and its existence and uniqueness are investigated. Also, a distributed robust power control and nonuniform price bargaining algorithm is proposed to approach the GE. Numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the algorithm performances, and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective in high mobility vehicular networks under uncertain channel environments.