Distributed radio resource allocation for device-to-device communications underlaying cellular networks

Abstract Underlaying Device-to-Device (D2D) communications can increase the spectral efficiency of cellular networks when sharing part of the spectrum with cellular users. This requires radio resource allocation policies capable to limit and control the interference between D2D and cellular communications. Many of the proposed policies are centralized, and require the base station to decide which resources should be allocated to each D2D transmission. Centralized schemes can efficiently control interference levels, but their feasibility can be compromised by their complexity and signaling overhead. To address this constraint, this paper proposes DiRAT, a distributed radio resource allocation scheme for D2D communications underlaying cellular networks. With DiRAT, the D2D nodes locally select their radio resources from a pool created by the cellular network in order to control the interference generated to the primary cellular users. DiRAT includes a control mechanism to ensure that the user QoS requirements are satisfied. This study demonstrates that DiRAT can increase the network capacity while avoiding or limiting the degradation of the performance of the primary cellular users. DiRAT also significantly reduces the complexity and overhead compared to existing centralized and distributed schemes.