Resource Control in Network Assisted Device-to-Device Communications: Solutions and Challenges

Network assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is envisioned as a promising technology to facilitate the discovery of geographically close cellular devices and reduce the communication cost between these devices. In order to fully take advantages of the freedom in resource management introduced by D2D communications, it is essential to design optimal resource control policies. In this article, we first review and classify the state-of-the-art research based on different considered network scenarios. We then introduce our preliminary studies on delay-aware resource control with bursty traffic, in which we propose an optimization framework and formulate a general queuing model for performance evaluation and optimization. Finally, the challenges and open issues are highlighted to serve as guidelines for future research.