Resource Allocation for RIS-Assisted Device-to-Device Communications in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In recent years, with the explosive growth of data traffic, communication base stations (BSs) need to serve more and more users. Offloading traffic from BSs has become an efficient way to reduce the burden on BSs. Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have emerged to improve spectrum utilization by reusing the frequency spectrum of the cellular frequency band. In the general environment, Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (HCNs) including millimeter wave (mm-wave) have appeared. Since the D2D link allows to share of spectrum resources with the cellular user, it will bring potential interference to the cellular user. Fortunately, an emerging technology called Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) can mitigate the severe interference caused by D2D links by shaping the incident beam and improving the multipath phase shift. In this paper, we study the resource allocation scheme to maximize the system sum rate, in the RIS-assisted single-cell heterogeneous D2D communication scenario. To solve the Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) problem, the problem of maximizing the sum rate is decomposed into three sub-problems. The resource allocation sub-problem is solved by a coalitional game method based on the game theory. The power allocation problem of the coalition converts the concave function into a convex optimization by mathematical transformation. The problem is solved by the gradient descent method. The local search method is adopted to find the optimum for the phase conversion problem. Then iterate until the difference of sum rate is less than the threshold. The simulation results show that the designed algorithm is superior to other benchmark schemes in the literature.