Overlapping coalition formation games-based resource allocation for device-to-device communication in LTE-A network

In the long‐term evolution‐advanced system, device‐to‐device (D2D) communication brings many significant benefits, such as low power consumption, low delay, high bit rates and efficient frequency utilisation. However, these potential advantages hinge on the intelligent resource allocation approach between D2D user equipments (DUEs) and cellular user equipments (CUEs). Different from existing work that focused on the scenario that one CUE shares spectrums with one D2D pair and thus disjoint groups are formed to use spectrums, in our paper, we proposed a coalition formulation game with overlapping coalitions. In this game, we model the resource sharing problem as a transferable coalition formation game where there exists intersection among these coalitions and the DUEs can make a decision to join or leave a coalition according to the merge‐and‐split rule. Consequently, not only one D2D pair can employ the same resource with multiple CUEs but also the channel of one CUE can be allocated to multiple D2D pairs in order to maximise the frequency efficiency and the system sum throughput. In particular, we consider the practical case and study the effect that only imperfect channel state information (CSI) can be obtained on the stable coalition formation game. A discrete‐time Markov chain‐based analysis is presented to obtain the stable coalition structure, and the complexity of employing this scheme is evaluated. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed overlapping coalition formulation game‐based scheme results in better performance compared to the traditional existing methods even in the imperfect CSI scenarios. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A solution based on an overlapping coalition formation game is proposed. In this game, device‐to‐device pairs make their decisions autonomously to join or leave a coalition according to the merge and split rule. A discrete‐time Markov chain is used to analyse the stability of the coalition, and the effect of imperfect channel state information on the stability is studied.