A Coalition Game for Backscatter-Aided Passive Relay Communications in Wireless-Powered D2D Networks

With the rapid development of the backscatter technology, backscatter-aided passive relays can be employed to improve the performance of wireless-powered device-to-device (D2D) networks. In this paper, we investigate the strategy of how the D2D pairs cooperate with each other in the network, and formulate the problem as a coalition game. In the coalition game, the players are the D2D pairs, the payoff of a D2D pair is the amount of its transmitted data, and the action is that each D2D pair can choose to stay or switch its coalition. We then develop the preference relation and the switch rule, and further design the switch algorithm for the D2D pairs to form coalitions. Moreover, we analyse the stability of the coalition game and the complexity of the proposed strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with the non-cooperative strategy, our developed cooperative strategy can efficiently improve the amount of the transmitted data.