Two-Stage Semi-Distributed Resource Management for Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks

In cellular networks, the device-to-device (D2D) communication increases the network capacity by spatial reuse of radio resources and prolongs the battery life of devices by reducing the transmission power. In this paper, we propose a two-stage semi-distributed resource management framework for the D2D communication. At the first stage of the framework, the base station (BS) allocates resource blocks (RBs) to BS-to-user device (B2D) links and D2D links, in a centralized manner. At the second stage, the BS schedules the transmission using the RBs allocated to B2D links, while the primary user device of each D2D link carries out link adaptation on the RBs allocated to the D2D link, in a distributed fashion. The proposed framework has the advantages of both centralized and distributed design approaches, i.e., high network capacity and low control/computational overhead, respectively. We formulate the problems of RB allocation to maximize the radio resources efficiency, taking account of two different policies on the spatial reuse of RBs. To solve these problems, we suggest a greedy algorithm and a column generation-based algorithm. By simulation, it is shown that the proposed scheme achieves the near-optimal performance while reducing the control/computational overhead.