Efficiency Resource Allocation for Device-to-Device Underlay Communication Systems: A Reverse Iterative Combinatorial Auction Based Approach
Peer-to-peer communication has been recently considered as a popular issue for local area services. An innovative resource allocation scheme is proposed to improve the performance of mobile peer-to-peer, i.e., device-to-device (D2D), communications as an underlay in the downlink (DL) cellular networks. To optimize the system sum rate over the resource sharing of both D2D and cellular modes, we introduce a reverse iterative combinatorial auction as the allocation mechanism. In the auction, all the spectrum resources are considered as a set of resource units, which as bidders compete to obtain business while the packages of the D2D pairs are auctioned off as goods in each auction round. We first formulate the valuation of each resource unit, as a basis of the proposed auction. And then a detailed non-monotonic descending price auction algorithm is explained depending on the utility function that accounts for the channel gain from D2D and the costs for the system. Further, we prove that the proposed auction-based scheme is cheat-proof, and converges in a finite number of iteration rounds. We explain non-monotonicity in the price update process and show lower complexity compared to a traditional combinatorial allocation. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently leads to a good performance on the system sum rate.
💡 Research Summary
The paper addresses the challenge of allocating downlink spectrum resources to device‑to‑device (D2D) links that operate as an underlay to a conventional cellular network. While D2D communication can greatly improve spectral efficiency and reduce latency, sharing the same frequency bands with cellular users inevitably creates interference, making the joint resource‑allocation problem highly combinatorial and NP‑hard. To tackle this, the authors propose a novel reverse iterative combinatorial auction (RICA) framework in which the spectrum resource units (RUs) themselves act as bidders, and the D2D pairs, each possibly requiring a bundle of several RUs, are treated as the goods to be auctioned.
System Model and Problem Formulation
A single‑cell scenario is considered. The total bandwidth is divided into (N) identical RUs, each initially assigned to a cellular user with a fixed transmit power. There are (M) D2D pairs; each pair may be allocated a subset (a “package”) of RUs. The objective is to maximize the overall sum‑rate, i.e., the sum of the downlink rates of cellular users plus the rates of D2D links, subject to the constraint that each RU can be assigned to at most one D2D package. This formulation leads to a combinatorial optimization problem that is computationally prohibitive for realistic values of (N) and (M).
Auction Design
In the reverse auction, each RU (i) computes a valuation for every D2D package (j) based on the expected gain in D2D throughput and the incurred interference cost to the cellular user sharing that RU. The valuation function is expressed as
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