Network-Assisted Distributed Fairness-Aware Interference Coordination for Device-to-Device Communication Underlaid Cellular Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaid cellular network is considered a key integration feature in future cellular network. However, without properly designed interference management, the interference from D2D transmission tends to degrade the performance of cellular users and D2D pairs. In this work, we proposed a network-assisted distributed interference mitigation scheme to address this issue. Specifically, the base station (BS) acts as a control agent that coordinates the cross-tier interference from D2D transmission through a taxation scheme. The cotier interference is controlled by noncooperative game amongst D2D pairs. In general, the outcome of noncooperative game is inefficient due to the selfishness of each player. In our game formulation, reference user who is the victim of cotier interference is factored into the payoff function of each player to obtain fair and efficient outcome. The existence, uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium (NE), and the convergence of the proposed algorithm are characterized using Variational Inequality theory. Finally, we provide simulation results to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.