Energy-Efficient resource allocation for device-to-device underlay communications in cellular networks

In device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks, the D2D user equipments (DUEs) can communicate by sharing the radio resources assigned to cellular user equipments. D2D communication is expected to improve the network throughput and save more energy for the user equipments. However, D2D communication causes severe interference to both the cellular users and other DUEs which is a challenge to radio resource allocation. The authors propose joint channel and power allocation algorithm to maximise the network achievable throughput, control the interference from the DUEs transmissions to cellular users and improve the energy efficiency of the user equipments. The authors formulate the problem and solve it using convex optimisation methods to select DUEs and set their powers in each channel. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can offer near-optimal performance and outperforms the comparable algorithms especially in terms of achievable throughput even with markedly reduced complexity levels.