Cluster-Oriented Device-to-Device Multimedia Communications: Joint Power, Bandwidth, and Link Selection Optimization

While achieving promising performance, there are still many challenges for the long term evolution advanced networks to offer support for the evolving multimedia services, especially in current big multimedia data era. The conventional multimedia communication schemes tend to serve all group members with the data rate supported by the receiver under the worst channel condition, which, however, may not provide satisfactory quality of service (QoS) for all receivers. In this paper, we propose a cluster-oriented device-to-device (D2D) multimedia communication scheme for multimedia services, which extends the conventional scheme with additional D2D communication to increase the total system data rate and thus provide satisfactory QoS for all receivers. In the proposed scheme, we jointly consider the power, bandwidth, and link selection optimization. To derive the optimal solution, we decompose the whole optimization problem into three subproblems. Specifically, we first formulate the power allocation problem as a Stackelberg game by fixing the bandwidth and D2D links as parameters, where the players are the multimedia server (MS) and the candidate D2D transmitter. The MS is the buyer who buys the power from the candidate D2D transmitter for D2D transmission and the candidate D2D transmitter is the seller who earns reward by helping the MS with the D2D transmission. Through analyzing the game, we derive the Stackelberg equilibrium as the optimal power allocation. Then, with the optimal power allocation, we optimize the bandwidth allocation and link selection by maximizing the MS's utility function. Finally, simulations are conducted to validate the proposed scheme.