Truthful reverse auction for relay selection, with high data rate and base station utility, in D2D networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication allows a mobile device (node) to relay data between a base station and another mobile device (destination) with poor direct channel conditions. However, the battery energy of a node serving as a relay gets depleted, and hence, to compensate for this loss, relays need to be provided incentives. Also, for a given destination, there usually exist multiple nodes in the network capable of providing relaying services. In this paper, we propose a reverse auction mechanism to select a node from among the available nodes to act as a relay for a destination in each of the following three scenarios: 1) when nodes are allocated a fixed transmission power, 2) when nodes are allocated the transmission power required to achieve a desired data rate, and 3) when the transmission power of nodes is selected so as to approximately maximize the base station's utility. Monetary payments (incentives) are provided to the selected node in each of the above three scenarios. We prove that all the proposed reverse auctions can be truthfully implemented as well as satisfy the individual rationality property. Finally, using numerical computations, we show that in the fixed transmission power scenario, our proposed auction significantly outperforms an auction based on the widely used Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism in terms of the data rate achieved by the destination node as well as the utility of the base station.