A Two-Level Game Theory Approach for Joint Relay Selection and Resource Allocation in Network Coding Assisted D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communication, which enables direct transmissions between mobile devices to improve spectrum efficiency, is one of the preferable candidate technologies for the next generation cellular network. Network coding, on the other hand, is widely used to improve throughput in ad hoc networks. Thus, the performance of D2D communications in cellular networks can potentially benefit from network coding. Aiming to improve the achievable capacity of D2D communications, we propose a system with inter-session network coding enabled to assist D2D transmissions. We formulate the joint problem of relay selection and resource allocation in network coding assisted D2D communications, and obtain the overall capacity of the network under complex interference conditions as a function of the relay selection and resource allocation. To solve the formulated problem, we propose a two-level decentralized approach termed NC-D2D, which solves the relay selection and resource allocation problems alternatively to obtain stable solutions for these two problems. Specifically, a coalition formation game associates relays with D2D pairs to enable network coding aided transmissions, and a greedy algorithm based game allocates limited cellular resources to D2D pairs and relays in NC-D2D, respectively. The performances of the proposed scheme is evaluated through extensive simulations to prove its superiority.