Distributed power control for device-to-device network using stackelberg game

Device-to-Device (D2D) technology provides a potential way to improve cellular network throughputs. However, severe interference is introduced with universal frequency reuse, which significantly degrades the network performance. In this paper, we investigate distributed power control strategies in a D2D underlaid cellular network. An enhanced single-leader-multiple-followers Stackelberg game model is presented, where the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints of both the macro base station user (leader) and the D2D users (followers) are considered simultaneously in the price update by using a discount factor. The conditions for the uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) are proposed, and a distributed power control algorithm related to the price update for the game model is proposed to achieve SE. The simulation results show that besides the reasonability and fairness in power allocation, our proposed scheme provides commendable QoS protection, and there exists a tradeoff between the QoS of the leader and followers by adopting different price policies.