Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting-Aided Device-to-Device Communications: A Matching Game Approach

In this paper, we propose an optimization problem of joint spectrum resource matching, power allocation and transmission time duration in energy harvesting (EH) aided device-to-device (D2D) communications underlying cellular network. Particularly, to increase the spectral efficiency (SE), multiple D2D links are permitted to multiplex the same resource block (RB) of cellular user (CU), and multiple cellular RBs are allowed to be reused by one D2D link. Taking into account the Quality of Service (QoS) of cellular users and the harvested energy of D2D links, our objective is to maximize the sum SE of D2D communications. Specifically, the joint problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which has been proved to be NP-hard. In view of this observation, a novel match-based resource allocation algorithm is designed, which contains two key sub-methods with a progressive relationship. First, a many-to-many matching game with externalities is developed, which produces spectrum reusing during each iteration. Second, on the basis of the spectrum matching, a resource allocation algorithm is presented by employing the Lagrange multiplier and Bisection search method. Finally, comprehensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm with different network parameter settings. Numerical results validate that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance and significantly outperform the other matching strategies in aspects of SE.