Device-to-Device Communications Employing Fog Nodes Using Parallel and Serial Interference Cancelers

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) communication allows user terminals to directly communicate with each other without the need for any base stations (BSs). Since the D2D communication underlaying a cellular system shares frequency channels with BSs, co-channel interference may occur. Successive interference cancellation (SIC), which is also called the serial interference canceler, detects and subtracts user signals from received signals in descending order of received power, can cope with the above interference and has already been applied to fog nodes that manage communications among machine-to-machine (M2M) devices besides direct communications with BSs. When differences among received power levels of user signals are negligible, however, SIC cannot work well and thus causes degradation in bit error rate (BER) performance. To solve such a problem, this paper proposes to apply parallel interference cancellation (PIC), which can simultaneously detect both desired and interfering signals under the maximum likelihood criterion and can maintain good BER performance even when power level differences among users are small. When channel coding is employed, however, SIC can be superior to PIC in terms of BER under some channel conditions. Considering the superiority, this paper also proposes to select the proper cancellation scheme and modulation and coding scheme (MCS) that can maximize the throughput of D2D under a constraint of BER, in which the canceler selection is referred to as adaptive interference cancellation. Computer simulations show that PIC outperforms SIC under almost all channel conditions and thus the adaptive selection from PIC and SIC can achieve a marginal gain over PIC, while PIC can achieve 10% higher average system throughput than that of SIC. As for transmission delay time, it is demonstrated that the adaptive selection and PIC can shorten the delay time more than any other schemes, although the fog node causes the delay time of 1 ms at least.