Incentive-Based D2D Relaying in Cellular Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) relaying is a concept, where some users relay data of cell-edge users (CUEs) experiencing a bad channel quality to a base station. While this research topic has received plenty of attention, a critical aspect of the D2D relaying remains a selfish nature of the users and their limited willingness to relay data for others. Thus, we propose a scheme to identify potential candidates for the relaying and provide a sound incentive to these relaying users (RUEs) to motivate them helping other users. First, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis showing when and if the relaying is beneficial for the CUE(s) and related RUE. Second, to choose among all possible incentive-compliant relaying options, we formulate the optimal CUE-to-RUE matching problem maximizing a network-wide performance. Since the optimal solution is hard to obtain for a high number of users, we propose a low-complexity greedy algorithm and prove its constant worst-case approximation guarantees to the optimum. Finally, we derive a closed-form expression for a fair allocation of the resources among the CUEs and the RUEs. The proposed framework more than doubles the users’ capacity and/or reduces the energy consumption by up to 87% comparing to existing incentive-based relaying schemes.