Joint access and backhaul resource allocation for D2D-assisted dense mmWave cellular networks

Abstract Device-to-Device (D2D) communication technology is a promising solution to solve the problem that millimeter-wave (mmWave) signal propagation is vulnerable to blockage and thus rapidly weakened. However, after introducing in-band D2D communication to dense mmWave cellular networks, we must consider how to reasonably share resources and effectively control interference between more types of communication links (e.g., D2D, access, backhaul), which makes the resource allocation problem more challenging. In other words, it is more challenging to investigate joint access and backhaul resource allocation problem for in-band D2D-assisted dense mmWave cellular networks. To address this challenging problem, we firstly decouple it into the two sub-problems (i.e., joint access and backhaul resource allocation sub-problem, and joint D2D access and forwarding link resource allocation sub-problem). Then, we formulate the two sub-problems as the two non-cooperative games respectively and prove that they are exact potential game and there exist feasible pure strategy Nash equilibrium under some mild conditions. Finally, based on the formulated game models, we propose a centralized algorithm and a decentralized algorithm to get resource allocation results respectively. The extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively mitigate the impact of blockage on network performance.