Interference Mitigation in D2D Communication Underlaying LTE-A Network

The mobile data traffic has risen exponentially in recent days due to the emergence of data intensive applications, such as online gaming and video sharing. It is driving the telecommunication industry as well as the research community to come up with new paradigms that will support such high data rate requirements within the existing wireless access network, in an efficient and effective manner. To respond to this challenge, device-to-device (D2D) communication in cellular networks is viewed as a promising solution, which is expected to operate, either within the coverage area of the existing eNB and under the same cellular spectrum (in-band) or separate spectrum (out-band). D2D provides the opportunity for users located in close proximity of each other to communicate directly, without traversing data traffic through the eNB. It results in several transmission gains, such as improved throughput, energy gain, hop gain, and reuse gain. However, integration of D2D communication in cellular systems at the same time introduces new technical challenges that need to be addressed. Containment of the interference among D2D nodes and cellular users is one of the major problems. D2D transmission radiates in all directions, generating undesirable interference to primary cellular users and other D2D users sharing the same radio resources resulting in severe performance degradation. Efficient interference mitigation schemes are a principal requirement in order to optimize the system performance. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the existing interference mitigation schemes present in the open literature. Based on the subjective and objective analysis of the work available to date, it is also envisaged that adopting a multi-antenna beamforming mechanism with power control, such that the transmit power is maximized toward the direction of the intended D2D receiver node and limited in all other directions will minimize the interference in the network. This could maximize the sum throughput and hence, guarantees the reliability of both the D2D and cellular connections.