Interference management in underlay in-band D2D-enhanced cellular networks: (Invited Paper)

Recently, it has been standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) [1] that device-to-device (D2D) communications should use uplink resources when coexisting with conventional cellular communications. With uplink resource sharing, both cellular and D2D links cause significant co-channel interference. In this paper, we consider a D2D mode selection criterion based on the maximum received signal strength (MRSS) for each user equipment (UE) to control the D2D-to-cellular interference. Specifically, a UE will operate in a cellular mode, if its received signal strength from the strongest base station (BS) is larger than a threshold β; otherwise, it will operate in a D2D mode. Furthermore, in our study, cellular UEs, D2D transmit UEs and D2D receiver UEs constitute the entire UE set, which is a more practical assumption than dropping more UEs for D2D reception only in existing works. The coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency (ASE) are derived for both the cellular network and the D2D one. Through our theoretical and numerical analyses, we quantify the performance gains brought by D2D communications and provide guidelines for selecting the parameters for network operations.