Energy Efficient D2D Communications: A Perspective of Mechanism Design

The energy consumption of a base station (BS) has attracted much attention in the study of wireless communication. Device-to-device communication, which can be utilized to offload the traffic from the BS, provides an effective way to increase network energy efficiency. How to optimally coordinate users to redistribute the traffic so as to minimize the energy consumption is an important issue. In this paper, we study two problems that are critical to this issue. First, considering that relaying data to others incurs costs to the users and different users have different costs, we propose a contract theoretical approach to design the mechanism for pricing the contributions of users. The second problem is to make a proper matching between users who demand data and users who are willing to relay data. Matching theory is exploited to deal with this problem. Specifically, we consider both interference-free and interference scenarios and develop matching algorithms, which can achieve stable matching and weak stable matching, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.