On mitigating interference under device-to-device communication in macro-small cell networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and small cell networks, as promising technologies to improve spectral efficiency and system throughput for future cellular networks, have received increasing attentions. In this paper, we model D2D communications in the two-tier heterogeneous macro-small cell networks. We propose not only two novel resource sharing strategies for D2D users, namely dedicated resource sharing strategy and cross-tier resource sharing strategy, but theirs corresponding power control strategies as well. In order to minimize cross-tier interference for the two-tier cellular networks, we formulate the optimization problem of power control and channel allocation, as a convex optimization problem and a 0-1 assignment problem, respectively. The system-level simulations demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly increase the throughput compared to cellular-only transmission. Simulation results also reveal the D2D communications can be regarded as an interference mitigation technology for the two-tier heterogeneous networks and present the high potential of D2D communications.