Empowering Device-to-Device Networks with Cross-Link Interference Management

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) communications is an emerging service model that is currently under standardization by 3GPP. While D2D offloading has a great potential to relieve increasingly congested cellular networks, its benefits, however, come at a cost, namely interference. Most of the prevailing D2D designs conservatively avoid interference via either spectrum resource allocation or power control. These designs, however, do not exploit spatial degrees of freedom (DoF), which are inherently supported by multi-antenna devices. In this work, we present $\sf {MD2D}$ , a multiuser D2D system that embraces concurrent D2D transmissions, while leveraging MIMO techniques to actively eliminate interference across D2D pairs. $\sf{MD2D}$ has a systematic methodology that checks whether the antenna combination in a D2D network is capable of eliminating cross-pair interference and, thereby, ensuring interference-free concurrent transmissions. If the interference can be eliminated, then $\sf{MD2D}$ applies a bucket-based DoF assignment algorithm to determine an effective antenna usage configuration that handles the interference. We evaluate our design via testbed experiments and large-scale simulations. The results show that, as compared to the traditional interference avoidance scheme, $\sf{MD2D}$ improves the throughput by 87.39 and 218.84 percent in a three-pair testbed and in large-scale simulations, respectively.