Optimal Base Station Scheduling for Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Cellular Networks

Abstract

With the emergence of demands for local area services, device-to-device (D2D) communication is proposed as a vital technology component for the next generation cellular communication to increase spectral efficiency and enhance system capacity. In a D2D underlaying cellular system, through carefully coordinated dynamic scheduling, some base stations can be shut down and the corresponding load can be transferred to the D2D communication, which provides significant energy savings without much impact on the overall system performance. In this paper, we study the base station scheduling in D2D communication given a large scale of users. By formulating this problem into a flow maximization problem that optimizes the data transmission from the base stations to the users, we obtain the optimal base station scheduling solution. Through extensive simulations with real human mobility traces, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, which significantly enhances the system throughput compared with existing strategies.