Optimal Time Reuse in Cooperative D2D Relaying Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has become one important part of the 5G cellular networks particularly due to the booming of proximity-based applications, e.g. D2D relays. However, the D2D relays may create strong interference to nearby users that are sharing the same spectrum. Thus resource reuse strategies in a cooperative network with D2D relays is critical. In this paper, we study the optimal time reuse patterns in a cellular network with cooperative D2D relays and derive the corresponding optimized relaying strategies. Due to the binary association constraints and the fact that the total number of feasible time reuse patterns increase exponentially with the number of servers, we have a large scale integer programming problem which is formidable to solve. However, we show that we just need to activate a few time reuse patterns to achieve the optimal network performance. Accordingly, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to find the set of active time reuse patterns and solve this problem in an approximated way. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our scheme can efficiently allocate the time resources and determine the relaying strategies. Furthermore, the proposed scheme offers significant gains relative to the existing ones.