Contextual Multi-armed Bandit Based Pricing Scheme for Cooperative D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) is a promising technology in 5G to improve network throughput, spectrum and energy efficiency, and transmission delay. It brings a new communication paradigm, cooperative D2D communication, which allows a user equipment (UE) to relay data for other UEs to the base station (BS). A relay UE consumes computing and communication resources, so that it should be compensated by setting price for the relay. In this paper, we investigate the pricing of relay UEs by modeling it with contextual multi-armed bandit (C-MAB). An online algorithm is designed to solve the C-MAB problem. Theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm converges to the optimal strategy asymptotically, and simulation results show that the C-MAB based pricing scheme results in both higher rewards for relay UEs and higher channel rate for the source UE.