D2D communications under LTE-U system: QoS and co-existence issues are incorporated

Abstract

Daily-life oriented applications and multimedia entertainments through smart devices are creating immense stress to the current cellular foundation. To overwhelm from this loopholes, both academia and industry are trying their best by incorporating different technologies with existing ones using licensed spectrum. On the other side, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are also being used to improve the spectrum efficiency and user experience by reutilizing licensed cellular spectrum. But with insufficient licensed spectrum, it is impossible to meet the demand of users in the current scenario. So, peoples are thinking to utilize unlicensed spectrum with licensed one to alleviate this scarcity issue and provide guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) to the users. In this paper, we want to extend D2D communication and LTE-A network into the unlicensed spectrum. But this initiative will harm the performance of other technologies which are already working in the same unlicensed band. Moreover, if multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) use the same unlicensed band then they will diminish the benefits of each other. So this paper wants to maximize the sum-rate of LTE users and D2D pairs by allocating licensed and unlicensed subchannels considering their QoS requirements while protecting minimum requirements of WiFi Access Points (WAPs). Then we solve this problem with the help of Nash bargaining game (NBG) between Small Cell Base Stations (SBSs) and WAPs by the cooperative approach. Simulation results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.