Resource sharing for D2D communication in multi small cell networks

Small cells provisioned with device-to-device (D2D) communication has the potential to meet the high capacity requirements for the indoor environments such as shopping malls etc. Enabling D2D communication under-laying cellular networks has paved the way for increased spectrum efficiency. It is critical to consider mutual interference between D2D and cellular users to exploit the full benefits of smaller distances of D2D and resource reuse. The idea of resource reuse has been studied for D2D in macro cells. However, reuse in neighbouring small cells involving D2D communication has not been explored. In this paper, we investigate resource sharing in a multi small cell network where small cell D2D users and neighbour small cell uplink users share resources. We formulate this as an optimization problem with an objective of minimizing the number of resource blocks used such that the interference and quality of service constraint is satisfied. We propose a spatial separation based reuse (SSBR) algorithm to solve the problem. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm efficiently enables resource sharing in the given scenario with lower complexity, as compared to the Outage algorithm.