Overlapping coalition formation games based interference coordination for D2D underlaying LTE-A networks

In the device-to-device (D2D) underlaying LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, unlike the existing works which formulate the resources sharing problem as a disjoint coalition formation game, in this letter we propose a novel overlapping coalition formation game (OCFG) based scheme to coordinate the interference between these two subsystems. By sharing uplink spectrums, in this game each D2D pair is allowed to join multiple coalitions simultaneously to improve the spectral efficiency and maximize the system utility. The merge-and-split rule is designed to adapt to the dynamic environment and a discrete-time Markov chain based analysis is utilized to present the stability. Compared with traditional methods, simulations demonstrate the significant performance enhancement of the proposed algorithm in terms of the complexity and D2D system sum throughput.