Stackelberg Game Based Social-Aware Power Allocation for Cooperative D2D Communications

As one of the indispensable techniques of the future cellular network, Device-to-Device communications can be potentially exploited to alleviate the traffic load by distributing data for base station. In order to stimulate users to cooperate, a price-based power allocation scheme is proposed in this paper, in which the requester pays the cost of power provided by the cooperative user for data forwarding combined with the social tie. Particularly, since the requester and cooperative user pursue the rate enhancement and reward maximization, respectively, the utility of these two sides is quantified according to the power cost and constraint. By introducing a two-stage Stackelberg game, the final price and power allocation strategy are determined via a dynamic bidding process while approaching the optimal utility of the requester and cooperative user. Simulation results show that the studied power allocation scheme can effectively stimulate the user to forward data and improve the system performance.