Joint relay selection and resource allocation in cooperative device-to-device communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications allow proximate cellular user equipments (UEs) to communicate with each other directly under the control of base station (BS). In this paper, considering the selection relaying (SR) rule which allows a subset of potential relays to forward the source’s data to the corresponding destination, we first establish a multi-relay system model where a D2D UE can act as not only a source but also a potential relay for another D2D link, and then analyze the cooperation behaviors among selfish UEs. Next a simple strategy is proposed to deal with the relay selection problem, and then the fair and efficient resource sharing problem among cooperating D2D UEs is formulated as a bargaining game. Since the game function is non-convex, we turn to an iterative method by introducing an auxiliary function to get the proportional fair resource allocation results. The system efficiency and fairness are proved by numeral simulation results.