Performance Analysis of Network-Assisted Two-Hop D2D Communications

TL;DR

This paper investigates how extending network-assisted D2D communication to multi-hop scenarios, with a novel distributed power control scheme, can enhance spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and coverage in cellular networks.

Contribution

It introduces a new distributed utility maximizing power control scheme for multi-hop D2D, supporting mode selection and resource management in cellular-D2D integration.

Findings

Multi-hop D2D improves spectral and energy efficiency.

The proposed power control scheme balances efficiency and coverage.

Numerical results confirm the benefits of multi-hop D2D with the scheme.

Abstract

Network-assisted single-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication can increase the spectral and energy efficiency of cellular networks by taking advantage of the proximity, reuse, and hop gains when radio resources are properly managed between the cellular and D2D layers. In this paper we argue that D2D technology can be used to further increase the spectral and energy efficiency if the key D2D radio resource management algorithms are suitably extended to support network assisted multi-hop D2D communications. Specifically, we propose a novel, distributed utility maximizing D2D power control (PC) scheme that is able to balance spectral and energy efficiency while taking into account mode selection and resource allocation constraints that are important in the integrated cellular-D2D environment. Our analysis and numerical results indicate that multi-hop D2D communications combined with the proposed PC scheme can be useful not only for harvesting the potential gains previously identified in the literature, but also for extending the coverage of cellular networks.