Game‐theoretic radio resource management for relay‐assisted access in wireless networks

Abstract

The radio resource management for relay-assisted access where every terminal user communicates with the base station through relay users is studied. In particular, the problem formulation is to maximise the total utility across relay users and terminal users under the bandwidth constraint of device-to-device (D2D) links. To solve such an optimisation problem, the authors first explore the diversity of channels between the relay users and the terminal users based on the maximum weighted bipartite matching theory, and adopt Hungarian algorithm to select the best relay user for each terminal user. Then, to stimulate relay users to participate in the cooperation, they design a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximise the utilities of the selected relay user and the terminal user. In this doing, every terminal user can obtain the optimal data rate with the aid of relay. Finally, the authors' simulations show that the proposed relay user selection and game-theoretic resource allocation scheme can effectively improve the downloading rates of terminal users and achieve a ‘win-win’ strategy between the terminal users and relay users for relay-assisted access using D2D communications.