Partial time-frequency resource allocation for device-to-device communications underlaying cellular networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks have been considered as an efficient way to improve the system capacity of the cellular networks in an underlaying paradigm. However, increasing interferences between regular cellular communications and D2D communications often prevent the overall system throughput from being further enhanced. To address the corresponding interference management issue, we in this paper study the intelligent resource allocation for D2D pairs. Unlike the conventional resource allocation scheme where each D2D pair shares only one cellular user´s entire resources upon approval, our approach allows D2D pairs to share only part of each cellular user´s resources, such that the interference on regular cellular communications can be suppressed. In the mean time, D2D pairs can share multiple cellular users´ resources to meet their own quality of services (QoS) requirement. Following the aforementioned principles, we propose a Partial Time-frequency Resource Allocation (PRA) framework for D2D communications. Under this framework, we design a category of sharing functions to map the channel status between D2D transmitters and cellular receivers to the resource proportion shareable for D2D users, through which a suboptimal yet simple and effective solution is derived, termed PRA scheme. Simulation results show that while meeting the D2D users´ QoS requirement, our proposed PRA scheme can improve the overall system capacity and stability as compared to the conventional approaches.