Towards a Fair Spectrum Access Strategy in Device-to-Device Communications

Base station assisted device-to-device communications (D2D) lets cellular users communicate directly. As D2D connections can operate on a joint frequency band, interference management is essential to boost the spectral efficiency and users’ quality of service. Two different approaches are proposed to tackle the interference in D2D networks. A power control scheme and a frequency-time scheduling are examined to achieve long-term fairness among D2D users. The power control maximizes weighted sum-rate of the users, where the weights indicate priority of the users. The second proposed strategy is to avoid interference when it is high. In this algorithm, the spectrum band is divided among users as interference coupling rises. A metric from the information theory literature has been adopted to measure the coupling. The proposed schemes are tested through multiple time slots and the average rate of a user and network sum-rate have been observed. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed power control scheme.