Mobility assisted device-to-device communications underlaying cellular networks

Abstract

With the explosive growth of mobile data demands for local services, device-to-device (D2D) communication is proposed as a vital technology for next generation cellular network to enhance the transmission capacity. With the popularity of content-based mobile applications, popular content downloading can be optimized by allowing D2D communications to share the content with each other. Such improvements depend on effective and efficient solutions for the D2D technical problems of mode selection and resource allocation. Existing works dealing with these technical problems usually stand in the viewpoint of some network snapshots with fixed topology of static mobile users to optimization the instantaneous resource utilization. In this paper, from an angle of dynamic networks, we consider the mode selection and resource allocation problems for D2D communication underlaying cellular network with opportunistic change of users' location by fully exploiting their mobility patterns to achieve global optimization. By formulating the above process-oriented optimization problems, we introduce a utility function and contention graph based approaches, termed MAD2D (Mobility assisted D2D), to heuristically solve them effectively. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate MAD2D greatly enhanced the system performance compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.