Elsevier

Pervasive and Mobile Computing

Volume 51, December 2018, Pages 138-149
Pervasive and Mobile Computing

Interference management for D2D communications in heterogeneous cellular networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmcj.2018.10.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) communications in cellular networks enable user equipments (UEs) to directly communicate with each other without the relay of base stations (BSs). They can improve network performance, while they also complicate interference management (IM). In this paper, the IM issue is studied for the D2D communications underlaying heterogeneous networks consisting of macro and small cells. Investigation is first made into D2D performance for UEs in different communication modes (D2D mode and device-to-cell modes). Then, a D2D feasible set is defined and derived which gives a region to allow D2D links to share network resource; and a feasible set scheme is proposed to manage the interference among communication links in order for the cellular links and D2D links to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements. After this, the optimal deployment of small cells is studied and an optimal deployment scheme is found that maximizes the transmission density while the QoS of links in different communication modes can be guaranteed. The analytical results are obtained and the calculations show that the proposed interference management schemes can effectively mitigate interference among cellular links and D2D links; and all the links (macro cell link, small cell link and D2D link) can satisfy the QoS requirement when they are sharing the resources. Compared to the neighbor based scheme, the proposed scheme can reduce the average outage probability up to 92%. In addition, the proposed deployment scheme can maximize the transmission capacity with guaranteed link QoSs.

Introduction

As one of key techniques in the fifth generation (5G) mobile communications, device-to-device (D2D) communication has attracted great attention in both academia and industry [1]. D2D communication enables proximal user equipments (UEs) to directly communicate with each other without relaying via base stations (BSs). Hence, the performance of cellular networks such as throughput, transmission delay and power consumption can be improved. However, D2D communication may bring about interference to the cellular links especially when it shares resource with cellular links. In the traditional long term evolution (LTE) network, intra-cell interference is reduced by allocating orthogonal resources to UEs in the same cell for the data transmission and inter-cell interference is mitigated by power control [2], scheduling [3] and coordinated multi point (CoMP) [4] technique to guarantee the link performance. Hence, the interference that underlay D2D communication introducing to cellular network is an important problem that needs to be solved in order for the D2D communication to be effectively applied [5]. In addition, dealing with this problem needs to model and manage the mutual interference among cellular links and D2D links in practical scenarios, e.g., heterogeneous network (HetNet) in the 5G since future network will be deployed with Ultra-Dense Networks (UDN) [6]. UDN is another key network technique of 5G in which small cells are deployed to improve the system capacity and the network coverage. However, frequency reuse of these small cells brings more severer interference. Thereby, as surveyed in [7], [8], there are very high chances of interference between the macro-cell links, the D2D links and the small cell links, which should be critically addressed when UDN and D2D communications are employed in 5G cellular networks.

In this work, we investigate the interference management problem for D2D communication underlaying the multi-tier cellular HetNet. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) Analyze performance for the transmission links under difficult communication modes. (2) Propose an interference management scheme for the multi-tier cellular network based on defined D2D feasible set (referring to Definition 1) which guarantees link QoS for both cellular link and D2D link. (3) Analyze the deployment problem of small cells to manage the interference for the multi-tier HetNet, and propose an optimal deployment scheme to improve the capacity of UDN and satisfy the QoS requirements for communication links under different communication modes. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Related works are introduced and compared in Section 2. System model is described in Section 3. Performance is analyzed and related interference management schemes are proposed in Sections 4 D2D feasible set for cellular HetNet, 5 Optimal deployment for small cells. Simulation results are presented in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 concludes this paper.

Section snippets

Related works

Interference over D2D links and cellular links counteracts the benefits of D2D technique. Thereby, various methods for interference reduction have been proposed, e.g., using power control, resource allocation, mode selection, signal processing, etc. In [9], a power control scheme is proposed which constraints the D2D transmission to protect coexisting cellular links. In [10], a framework is proposed for analyzing mode selection and power control of underlaying D2D communications. In [11], an

Network model.

We consider a heterogeneous scenario of a typical 5G cellular network, which consists of macro and small cells (Fig. 1). The small cells are randomly deployed in the cellular network, and the locations of their BSs are assumed to follow Poisson point process (PPP) with density λs. Each UE in such a heterogeneous network may have three alternative communication modes

  • (1)

    D2D communication mode: the UE forms a D2D pair with another UE in its proximity and communicates directly with each other through

D2D feasible set for cellular HetNet

To manage interference among communication links in different communication modes, we firstly define the feasible set of D2D UEs as follows.

Definition 1

For a random D2D pair Fij underlaying a cellular link FMk, the D2D feasible set ΨFij is defined as the union set that consists of all places where the D2D pair can be located with satisfied QoS requirement for both the D2D pair Fij and its underlaying cellular link FMj. Specifically, a member in ΨFij, denoted by σ, is a location of D2D pair Fij in the

Optimal deployment for small cells

From analyses in Section 4, we find that the link QoS can be guaranteed by the proposed feasible set scheme. However, Proposition 1, Proposition 2, Proposition 3 indicate that there is an upper bound for the small cell density to make sure that a feasible set for D2D UEs exists. If the density of small cells is beyond a threshold, the feasible set has no solution and at least one of communication links cannot satisfy the QoS requirement due to excess interference from small cells when D2D

Simulation results

In this section, simulation results are presented and the simulations parameters are shown in Table 3. The settings of these simulation parameters can be referred to [25]. By varying these parameters, we can observe the impacts of different factors on the network performance. For example, the number of devices affects the interference induced by D2D links. The macro radius affects the interference induced by macro cellular links. The density of small cells affects the interference induced by

Conclusion

In this paper, we have dealt with Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying multi-tier cellular heterogeneous network (HetNet). We first derive the outage probabilities of D2D link, macro cell link and small cell link, respectively. In addition, we present the lower bounds for the distances from a macro base station (BS) to a D2D receiver, from a D2D transmitter to the receiver of its co-channel macro cell link and from D2D transmitter to the receiver of its co-channel small cell link.

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61601283, U1701265 and No. 61472237).

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