Impact of Underlaid Multi-antenna D2D on Cellular Downlink in Massive MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how multi-antenna D2D underlaid in massive MIMO systems affects cellular downlink spectral efficiency, revealing that increasing D2D density can improve cellular performance up to a fundamental limit.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of the spectral efficiency in massive MIMO systems with multi-antenna D2D underlay, highlighting the impact of D2D density and antenna count on cellular performance.

Findings

Cellular spectral efficiency increases with D2D density and approaches a limit.

The fundamental limit depends on the ratio of D2D ASE to the number of D2D antennas.

Doubling the number of D2D antennas approximately doubles the D2D ASE for a fixed limit.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink system underlaid with a network of multi-antenna D2D user equipments (UEs). Each D2D transmitter (Tx) uses all its antennas to beamform information towards its desired D2D receiver, which uses only a single antenna for reception. While beamforming at the D2D Tx reduces D2D interference to the neighbouring cellular UEs (CUEs), the cellular-to-D2D interference is also negligible due to highly directional beamforming at the massive MIMO base station. For the above proposed system, we analyze the average per-user spectral efficiency (SE) of CUEs ($R^{c,d}$) as a function of the D2D area spectral efficiency (ASE). Our analysis reveals that for a fixed D2D ASE ($R_0^{(d)}$) and fixed number of D2D antennas ($N$), with increasing density of D2D Txs ($\lambda$), $R^{c,d}$ increases (for sufficiently large $\lambda$) and approaches a fundamental limit $R_{\infty}^{c,d}$ as $\lambda \to \infty$. Also, $R_{\infty}^{c,d}$ depends on $R_{0}^{(d)}$ and $N$, only through the ratio $\frac{R_{0}^{(d)}}{N-1}$, i.e, for a given fundamental limit $R_{\infty}^{c,d}$, the D2D ASE can be approximately doubled with every doubling in $N$.