Resource Management for Cellular-Assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) Communications

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has become a promising candidate for future wireless communication systems to improve the system spectral efficiency, while reducing the latency and energy consumption of individual communication. With the assistance of cellular network, D2D communications can greatly reduce the transmit distance by utilizing the spatial dispersive nature of ever increasing user devices. Further, substantial spectrum reuse gain can be achieved due to the short transmit distance of D2D communication. It, however, significantly complicates the resource management and performance analysis of D2D communication underlaid cellular networks. Despite an increasing amount of academic attention and industrial interests, how to evaluate the system performance advantages of D2D communications with resource management remains largely unknown. On account of the proximity requirement of D2D communication, the resource management of D2D communication generally consists of admission access control and resource allocation. Resource allocation of cellular assisted D2D communications is very challenging when frequency reuse is considered among multiple D2D pairs within a cell, as intense inter D2D interference is difficult to tackle and generally causes extremely large amount of signaling overheads for channel state information (CSI) acquisition. Hence, the first part of this thesis is devoted to the resource allocation of cellular assisted D2D communication and the performance analysis. A novel resource allocation scheme for cellular assisted D2D communication is developed with low signaling overhead, while maintaining high spectral efficiency. By utilizing the spatial dispersive nature of D2D pairs, a geography-based sub-cell division strategy is proposed to group the D2D pairs into multiple disjoint clusters, and sub-cell resource allocation is performed independently for the D2D pairs within each sub-cell without the need of any prior knowledge of inter D2D interference. Under the proposed resource allocation scheme, tractable approximation for the inter D2D interference modeling is obtained and a computationally efficient expression for the average ergodic sum capacity of the cell is derived. The expression further allows us to obtain the optimal number of sub-cells that maximizes the average ergodic sum capacity of the cell. It is shown that with small CSI feedback, the system capacity/spectral efficiency can be improved significantly by adopting the proposed resource allocation scheme, especially in dense D2D deployment scenario. The investigation of use cases for cellular assisted D2D communication is another important topic which has direct effect on the performance evaluation of D2D communication. Thanks to the spatial dispersive nature of devices, D2D communication can be utilized to harvest the vast amount of the idle computation power and storage space distributed at the devices, which yields sufficient capacities for performing computation-intensive and latency-critical tasks. Therefore, the second part of this thesis focuses on the D2D communication assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) network. The admission access control of D2D communication is determined by both disciplines of mobile computing and wireless communications. Specifically, the energy minimization problem in D2D assisted MEC networks is addressed with the latency constraint of each individual task and the computing resource constraint of each computing entity. The energy minimization problem is formed as a two-stage optimization problem. At the first stage, an initial feasibility problem is formed to maximize the number of executed tasks, and the global energy minimization problem is tackled in the second stage while maintaining the maximum number of executed tasks. Both of the optimization problems in two stages are NP-hard, therefore a low-complexity algorithm is developed for the initial feasibility problem with a supplementary algorithm further proposed for energy minimization. Simulation results demonstrate the near-optimal performance of the proposed algorithms and the fact that the number of executed tasks is greatly increased and the energy consumption per executed task is significantly reduced with the assistance of D2D communication in MEC networks, especially in dense user scenario

Benchmarking Practical RRM Algorithms for D2D Communications in LTE Advanced

Device-to-device (D2D) communication integrated into cellular networks is a means to take advantage of the proximity of devices and allow for reusing cellular resources and thereby to increase the user bitrates and the system capacity. However, when D2D (in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project also called Long Term Evolution (LTE) Direct) communication in cellular spectrum is supported, there is a need to revisit and modify the existing radio resource management (RRM) and power control (PC) techniques to realize the potential of the proximity and reuse gains and to limit the interference at the cellular layer. In this paper, we examine the performance of the flexible LTE PC tool box and benchmark it against a utility optimal iterative scheme. We find that the open loop PC scheme of LTE performs well for cellular users both in terms of the used transmit power levels and the achieved signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution. However, the performance of the D2D users as well as the overall system throughput can be boosted by the utility optimal scheme, because the utility maximizing scheme takes better advantage of both the proximity and the reuse gains. Therefore, in this paper we propose a hybrid PC scheme, in which cellular users employ the open loop path compensation method of LTE, while D2D users use the utility optimizing distributed PC scheme. In order to protect the cellular layer, the hybrid scheme allows for limiting the interference caused by the D2D layer at the cost of having a small impact on the performance of the D2D layer. To ensure feasibility, we limit the number of iterations to a practically feasible level. We make the point that the hybrid scheme is not only near optimal, but it also allows for a distributed implementation for the D2D users, while preserving the LTE PC scheme for the cellular users.Comment: 30 pages, submitted for review April-2013. See also: G. Fodor, M. Johansson, D. P. Demia, B. Marco, and A. Abrardo, A joint power control and resource allocation algorithm for D2D communications, KTH, Automatic Control, Tech. Rep., 2012, qC 20120910, http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-10205

Efficiency Resource Allocation for Device-to-Device Underlay Communication Systems: A Reverse Iterative Combinatorial Auction Based Approach

Peer-to-peer communication has been recently considered as a popular issue for local area services. An innovative resource allocation scheme is proposed to improve the performance of mobile peer-to-peer, i.e., device-to-device (D2D), communications as an underlay in the downlink (DL) cellular networks. To optimize the system sum rate over the resource sharing of both D2D and cellular modes, we introduce a reverse iterative combinatorial auction as the allocation mechanism. In the auction, all the spectrum resources are considered as a set of resource units, which as bidders compete to obtain business while the packages of the D2D pairs are auctioned off as goods in each auction round. We first formulate the valuation of each resource unit, as a basis of the proposed auction. And then a detailed non-monotonic descending price auction algorithm is explained depending on the utility function that accounts for the channel gain from D2D and the costs for the system. Further, we prove that the proposed auction-based scheme is cheat-proof, and converges in a finite number of iteration rounds. We explain non-monotonicity in the price update process and show lower complexity compared to a traditional combinatorial allocation. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently leads to a good performance on the system sum rate.Comment: 26 pages, 6 fgures; IEEE Journals on Selected Areas in Communications, 201

Resource Allocation for Network-Integrated Device-to-Device Communications Using Smart Relays

With increasing number of autonomous heterogeneous devices in future mobile networks, an efficient resource allocation scheme is required to maximize network throughput and achieve higher spectral efficiency. In this paper, performance of network-integrated device-to-device (D2D) communication is investigated where D2D traffic is carried through relay nodes. An optimization problem is formulated for allocating radio resources to maximize end-to-end rate as well as conversing QoS requirements for cellular and D2D user equipment under total power constraint. Numerical results show that there is a distance threshold beyond which relay-assisted D2D communication significantly improves network performance when compared to direct communication between D2D peers