Coordinated beamforming and power control for network controlled Device-to-Device (D2D) communication

Since the integration of data services into cellular communications, cellular operators are struggling to harness the overwhelming data traffic on their networks. Underlay Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a new and promising paradigm which allows proximate mobile users to have direct communication over the cellular spectrum that may be reused by other cellular users in the same cell. This new paradigm is proposed to assist the cellular operators to deal with the booming demand of mobile users. Recent studies have shown that underlay D2D communication significantly increases the cellular network capacity, and enables cellular operators to support rich multimedia services. However, reusing cellular resources for both D2D and cellular communication introduces interference issues. In such systems, interference management is of utmost importance because improper interference coordination may lead to a self-destructive network. Power control and beamforming appears to be viable techniques for interference management which can also be used to enhance the energy efficiency of the system. Network coordinated sum power optimization schemes for D2D communications underlaying uplink and downlink cellular spectrum is considered in this thesis. In particular, the system optimization target is to minimize the sum transmission power while guaranteeing the user specific rate constraints. Novel algorithms are proposed to solve the power minimization problem optimally. For the uplink, the problem is solved using joint transmit power control and receive beamforming algorithm. The downlink problem is reformulated as a second-order cone program (SOCP), and thus, it can be solved efficiently via standard SOCP solvers. Moreover, a decentralized algorithm is proposed that reduces the amount of control information exchange in comparison to the centralized approach. The performance of the proposed algorithms is compared with the conventional cellular scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed underlay D2D communication approach is capable of achieving significant performance gains over the conventional cellular scheme. Results also illustrate that the power consumption of the system is highly affected by the location of the interfering cellular user and whether the resources are shared in uplink or downlink. Therefore, four different resource sharing areas are defined for D2D communications. These areas specify the type of resources (i.e., downlink and uplink) suitable for D2D communication