Joint User Association and Resource Allocation of Device-to-Device Communication in Small Cell Networks

Abstract

With the recent popularity of smart terminals, the demand for high-data-rate transmission is growing rapidly, which brings a new challenge for the traditional cellular networks. Both device-to-device (D2D) communication and small cells are effective to improve the transmission efficiency of local communication. In this paper, we apply D2D communication into a small cell network system (SNets) and study about the optimization problem of resource allocation for D2D communication. The optimization problemincludes system scheduling and resource allocation, which is exponentially complex and the optimal solution is infeasible to achieve. Therefore, in this paper, the optimization problem is decomposed into several smaller problems and a hierarchical scheme is proposed to obtain the solution. The proposed hierarchical scheme consists of three steps: D2D communication groups formation, the estimation of sub-channels needed by each D2D communication group and specific resource allocation. From numerical simulation results, we find that the proposed resource allocation scheme is effective in improving the spectral efficiency and reducing the outage probability of D2D communication.