An Adaptive Content Sharing Scheme of Multi-Cluster Head for Energy Harvesting-Based D2D Multicast Communication

The fluctuant and unreliable available energy has been the main reason for limiting the development of Energy Harvesting (EH)-based Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication. Multicasting can further improve energy efficiency by content sharing for EH-D2D communication. However, to satisfy the transmission Quality of Service (QoS) of cluster member with the worst channel state quality, the single cluster head in an EH-based D2D Multicast (EH-D2MD) Communication will face the conflict between energy shortage and consumption due to the requirement of energy consumption of multicasting and the fluctuation of available energy of EH. As a result, the QoS of multicasting transmission will deteriorate rapidly. To address the conflict, this paper designs an Adaptive Content Sharing scheme of Multi-cluster Head (ACS-MH) with the aim of improving the throughput of EH-D2MD. To solve the non-convex Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) property of the throughput maximization problem and give it a union solution, we propose a three-step Convex Approximate lower-bound Algorithm (3-CDA). Simulations show that ACS-MH can effectively improve the throughput and spectrum efficiency of EH-D2MD.