Traffic Offloading in Multicast Device-to-Device Cellular Networks: A Combinatorial Auction-Based Matching Algorithm

In the last few years, multicast device-to-device (D2D) cellular networks has become a highly attractive area of research. However, a particularly challenging class of issues in this area is data traffic, which increases due to increase in video and audio streaming applications. Therefore, there is need for smart spectrum management policies. In this paper, we consider a fractional frequency reuse (FFR) technique which divides the whole spectrum into multiple sections and allows reusing of spectrum resources between the conventional cellular users and multicast D2D users in a non-orthogonal scenario. Since conventional cellular users and multicast D2D users shared same resources simultaneously, they generate severe data traffic and high communication overhead. To overcome these issues, in this paper we propose Lagrange relaxation technique to solve the non-convex problem and combinatorial auction-based matching algorithm to select the most desirable resource reuse partners by fulfilling the quality of service (QoS) requirements for both the conventional cellular users and multicast D2D users. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the overall system performance with least computational complexity. We demonstrate that our method can exploit a higher data rate, spectrum efficiency, traffic offload rate, coverage probability, and lower computational complexity.