Spectrum Trading for Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks using Incomplete Information Bandwidth-Auction Game

Device-to-device (D2D) communication that allows proximity users to communicate directly has been recently proposed to improve spectral efficiency of cellular networks. In this paper, we assume a cellular network consisting of multiple cellular user equipments (CUEs), which are the primary users, and a cognitive D2D pair, which is the secondary user. The D2D pair needs a bandwidth for data transmission that can be obtained via spectrum trading. We introduce a bandwidth-auction game for the spectrum trading problem. The base station (BS) and CUEs are able to sell their spectrum or share it with the D2D pair, which allows the D2D pair to operate in orthogonal sharing, cellular, or non-orthogonal sharing (NOS) modes. Operation of the D2D pair in the NOS mode causes interference to the CUEs, which is possible under low interference condition. In the auction, the D2D pair can buy its required spectrum from three different service providers (SPs) corresponding to each mode that operate on different frequency spectrums. The D2D pair bids a price-bandwidth demand curve and the SPs offer a price-demand supply curve. Since each player is not aware of the strategy of other players in practical scenarios, the game is assumed to be an incomplete information repeated one. A best response based learning method is proposed for the decision making procedure of all players, the D2D pair and SPs. It is shown that the proposed method converges to the Nash equilibrium (NE) point of the game more rapidly than the state-of-the-art methods when the game is played repeatedly. The sensitivity of the proposed method to the learning rate variable is also less than the state-of-the-art methods and hence can be considered as a robust one.

I. Introduction

Cognitive radio is a promising techniques that has been proposed in order to solve the spectrum scarcity problem [1]. In a cognitive radio network, secondary users (SUs) are able to reuse the radio resources of primary users (PUs) while the resources are not being used by PUs or the interference caused to PUs from SUs does not degrade the quality of service of PUs below a predetermined threshold. In addition, device-to-device (D2D) communication which corresponds to direct data transmission between two proximity user equipments (UEs) without going through the base station (BS) has also been proposed in order to increase the overall spectral efficiency (SE) of cellular networks or to offload part of the cellular traffic under heavy load of cellular networks [2]. This communication technique that enables the network to provide service to a larger number of users has been considered in 3GPP LTE-Advanced standard.