D2D Assisted Cellular Networks in Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrum: Matching-Iteration-Based Joint User Access and Resource Allocation

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, which enable direct communication between nearby user devices over the licensed spectrum, have been considered a key technique to improve spectral efficiency and system throughput in cellular networks (CNs). However, the limited spectrum resources cannot be sufficient to support more cellular users (CUs) and D2D users to meet the growth of the traffic data in future wireless networks. Therefore, Long-Term Evolution-Unlicensed (LTE-U) and D2D-Unlicensed (D2D-U) technologies have been proposed to further enhance system capacity by extending the CUs and D2D users on the unlicensed spectrum for communications. In this paper, we consider an LTE network where the CUs and D2D users are allowed to share the unlicensed spectrum with Wi-Fi users. To maximize the sum rate of all users while guaranteeing each user’s quality of service (QoS), we jointly consider user access and resource allocation. To tackle the formulated problem, we propose a matching-iteration-based joint user access and resource allocation algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve system throughput compared to the other benchmark algorithms.