A Distributed Mode Selection Approach Based on Evolutionary Game for Device-to-Device Communications

As one of the key technologies for the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, device-to-device (D2D) communications offer promising benefits such as high spectrum efficiency, traffic offloading, and enhanced coverage. Depending on the resource sharing between D2D users and regular cellular users, a D2D user equipment (UE) can dynamically switch its communication mode to improve the quality of service (QoS) and user experience. Mode selection is an essential issue to ensure the QoS of D2D UEs while maximizing the system capacity. In this paper, we investigate the D2D mode selection problem from a novel perspective. In addition to the classic cellular mode and direct reuse mode, we further consider a relay mode for D2D UEs. Moreover, in order to address a potentially large population of D2D UEs, we propose an evolutionary game-based approach for D2D mode selection. The evolutionary game is formulated with a utility function that takes into account both the achievable throughput of D2D UEs and the radio resource consumption. Based on the evolutionary game formulation, we implement selection dynamics, i.e., replication by imitation, in a device-controlled mode selection algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mode selection algorithm, we conduct simulations to compare it with three baseline schemes, including an approach based on maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise, a distance-based approach, and a random approach. As shown in the simulation results, the proposed approach achieves higher utilities than the baseline schemes.