Pricing-Based Channel Selection for D2D Content Sharing in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

In order to make device-to-device (D2D) content sharing give full play to its advantage of improving local area services, one of the important issues is to decide the channels that D2D pairs occupy. Most existing works study this issue in static environment, and ignore the guidance for D2D pairs to select the channel adaptively. In this paper, we investigate this issue in dynamic environment where D2D pairs’ activeness and wireless channel are dynamic. Specifically, we propose a pricing-based approach to guide D2D pairs to select different channels according to the spectrum resource states adaptively. Then, we formulate the pricing-based channel selection problem as an expected global price-to-performance ratio minimum problem. In order to solve it in a tractable manner, we make an approximately equivalent transformation to it. After that, we model the transformed problem as a stochastic game and prove it to be an exact potential game, which has at least one pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (NE) point. In order to reach the pure strategy NE points in dynamic environment, we design a channel selection learning algorithm based on stochastic learning automata, which only requires little information exchange. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms other benchmark algorithms.