Exploiting Device-to-Device Communications to Enhance Spatial Reuse for Popular Content Downloading in Directional mmWave Small Cells

With the explosive growth of mobile demand, small cells in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands underlying the macrocell networks have attracted intense interest from both academia and industry. MmWave communications in the 60 GHz band are able to utilize the huge unlicensed bandwidth to provide multiple Gbps transmission rates. In this case, device-to-device (D2D) communications in mmWave bands should be fully exploited due to no interference with the macrocell networks and higher achievable transmission rates. In addition, due to less interference by directional transmission, multiple links including D2D links can be scheduled for concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse). With the popularity of content-based mobile applications, popular content downloading in the small cells needs to be optimized to improve network performance and enhance user experience. In this paper, we develop an efficient scheduling scheme for popular content downloading in mmWave small cells, termed PCDS (popular content downloading scheduling), where both D2D communications in close proximity and concurrent transmissions are exploited to improve transmission efficiency. In PCDS, a transmission path selection algorithm is designed to establish multi-hop transmission paths for users, aiming at better utilization of D2D communications and concurrent transmissions. After transmission path selection, a concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm is designed to maximize the spatial reuse gain. Through extensive simulations under various traffic patterns, we demonstrate PCDS achieves near-optimal performance in terms of delay and throughput, and also superior performance compared with other existing protocols, especially under heavy load.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Distributed power allocation for D2D communications underlaying/overlaying OFDMA cellular networks

The implementation of device-to-device (D2D) underlaying or overlaying pre-existing cellular networks has received much attention due to the potential of enhancing the total cell throughput, reducing power consumption and increasing the instantaneous data rate. In this paper we propose a distributed power allocation scheme for D2D OFDMA communications and, in particular, we consider the two operating modes amenable to a distributed implementation: dedicated and reuse modes. The proposed schemes address the problem of maximizing the users' sum rate subject to power constraints, which is known to be nonconvex and, as such, extremely difficult to be solved exactly. We propose here a fresh approach to this well-known problem, capitalizing on the fact that the power allocation problem can be modeled as a potential game. Exploiting the potential games property of converging under better response dynamics, we propose two fully distributed iterative algorithms, one for each operation mode considered, where each user updates sequentially and autonomously its power allocation. Numerical results, computed for several different user scenarios, show that the proposed methods, which converge to one of the local maxima of the objective function, exhibit performance close to the maximum achievable optimum and outperform other schemes presented in the literature

Distributed SIR-Aware Opportunistic Access Control for D2D Underlaid Cellular Networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed interference and channel-aware opportunistic access control technique for D2D underlaid cellular networks, in which each potential D2D link is active whenever its estimated signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is above a predetermined threshold so as to maximize the D2D area spectral efficiency. The objective of our SIR-aware opportunistic access scheme is to provide sufficient coverage probability and to increase the aggregate rate of D2D links by harnessing interference caused by dense underlaid D2D users using an adaptive decision activation threshold. We determine the optimum D2D activation probability and threshold, building on analytical expressions for the coverage probabilities and area spectral efficiency of D2D links derived using stochastic geometry. Specifically, we provide two expressions for the optimal SIR threshold, which can be applied in a decentralized way on each D2D link, so as to maximize the D2D area spectral efficiency derived using the unconditional and conditional D2D success probability respectively. Simulation results in different network settings show the performance gains of both SIR-aware threshold scheduling methods in terms of D2D link coverage probability, area spectral efficiency, and average sum rate compared to existing channel-aware access schemes.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to be presented at IEEE GLOBECOM 201