Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201

An Extensive Game-Based Resource Allocation for Securing D2D Underlay Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has been increasingly attractive due to its great potential to improve cellular communication performance. While resource allocation optimization for improving the spectrum efficiency is of interest in the D2D-related work, communication security, as a key issue in the system design, has not been well investigated yet. Recently, a few studies have shown that D2D users can actually serve as friendly jammers to help enhance the security of cellular user communication against eavesdropping attacks. However, only a few studies considered the security of D2D communications. In this paper, we consider the secure resource allocation problem, particularly, how to assign resources to cellular and the D2D users to maximize the system security. To solve this problem, we propose an extensive game-based algorithm aiming at strengthening the security of both cellular and the D2D communications via system resource allocation. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed method is able to efficiently improve the overall system security when compared to existing studies