Scheduling of resource blocks for Device-to-Device communications in LTE-Advanced networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is seen as an important step in the LTE-A networks to improve spectral efficiency through reuse of resource blocks (RBs). In a scenario without D2D communication, the base station (referred in LTE-A network as eNB) allocates the RBs to the user equipments (UEs) (i.e., client devices in LTE-A network) based on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) reported by them. However, if the RBs are to be reused for D2D communications then the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at each device (eNodeB included) sharing those RBs would decrease thereby deteriorating the network performance. To control the SINR violation the network operator may have to set target SINR values for all devices. The focus of this paper is to simultaneously allocate resource blocks for D2D communication and for the uplink (i.e., UE to eNodeB). First, an optimization problem is formulated to perform the scheduling of the RBs. But since the optimization problem is NP hard, an iterative heuristic resource block allocation algorithm (which respect the constraints of the optimization problem) is proposed. The proposed algorithm is compared with a modified version of an existing algorithm. The simulation results give important inferences which can help a network operator to select the desired target SINR for a given system setting.