Fair Scheduling Policies Exploiting Multiuser Diversity in Cellular Systems with Device-to-Device Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel resource allocation policies for cellular networks with D2D communications, improving fairness and spectral efficiency by exploiting multi-user diversity and spatial reuse in orthogonal and non-orthogonal sharing scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes and analyzes three new scheduling policies—CFS, DFS, and GFS—that enhance fairness and performance in D2D-enabled cellular systems under different resource sharing schemes.

Findings

CFS provides a simple D2D extension with fairness guarantees.

DFS maximizes performance in orthogonal D2D sharing.

GFS achieves high spectral efficiency with perfect fairness in non-orthogonal sharing.

Abstract

We consider the resource allocation problem in cellular networks which support Device-to-Device Communications (D2D). For systems that enable D2D via only orthogonal resource sharing, we propose and analyze two resource allocation policies that guarantee access fairness among all users, while taking advantage of multi-user diversity and local D2D communications, to provide marked improvements over existing cellular-only policies. The first policy, the Cellular Fairness Scheduling (CFS) Policy, provides the simplest D2D extension to existing cellular systems, while the second policy, the D2D Fairness Scheduling (DFS) Policy, harnesses maximal performance from D2D-enabled systems under the orthogonal sharing setting. For even higher spectral efficiency, cellular systems with D2D can schedule the same frequency resource for more than one D2D pairs. Under this non-orthogonal sharing environment, we propose a novel group scheduling policy, the Group Fairness Scheduling (GFS) Policy, that exploits both spatial frequency reuse and multiuser diversity in order to deliver dramatic improvements to system performance with perfect fairness among the users, regardless of whether they are cellular or D2D users.