Benchmarking Practical RRM Algorithms for D2D Communications in LTE Advanced

Device-to-device (D2D) communication integrated into cellular networks is an advanced tool to take advantage of the proximity of devices and allow for reusing cellular resources and thereby to increase the user bitrates and the system capacity. However, the introduction of D2D in legacy long term evolution (LTE) cellular spectrum requires to revisit and modify the existing radio resource management and power control (PC) techniques in order to fully realize the potential of the proximity and reuse gains and to limit the interference to the cellular layer. In this paper, we examine the performance of the legacy LTE PC tool box and benchmark it against an utility optimal iterative scheme. We find that the open loop PC scheme of LTE performs well for cellular users both in terms of the used transmit power levels and the achieved signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio distribution. However, the performance of the D2D users as well as the overall system throughput can be boosted by the utility optimal scheme, by taking better advantage of both the proximity and the reuse gains. Therefore, in this paper we propose a hybrid PC scheme, in which cellular users employ the legacy LTE open loop PC, while D2D users exploits the utility optimizing distributed PC scheme. We also recognize that the hybrid scheme is not only nearly optimal, and can balance between spectral and energy efficiency, but it also allows for a distributed implementation at the D2D users, while preserving the LTE PC scheme for the cellular users.