On the Outage Probability of Device-to-Device-Communication-Enabled Multichannel Cellular Networks: An RSS-Threshold-Based Perspective

In this paper, we study the outage probability of device-to-device (D2D)-communication-enabled cellular networks from a general threshold-based perspective. Specifically, a mobile user equipment (TIE) transmits in D2D mode if the received signal strength (RSS) from the nearest base station (BS) is less than a specified threshold β ≥ 0; otherwise, it connects to the nearest BS and transmits in cellular mode. The RSS-threshold-based setting is general in the sense that by varying β from β = 0 to β = ∞, the network accordingly evolves from a traditional cellular network (including only cellular mode) toward a wireless ad hoc network (including only D2D mode). We provide a unified framework to analyze the downlink outage probability in a multichannel environment with Rayleigh fading, where the spatial distributions of BSs and TIEs are well explicitly accounted for by utilizing stochastic geometry. We derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability of a generic TIE and that in both cellular mode and D2D mode and quantify the performance gains in outage probability that can be obtained by allowing such RSS-thresholdbased D2D communications. We show that increasing the number of channels, although able to support more cellular TIEs, may result in an increase of outage probability in the D2D-enabled cellular network. The corresponding condition and reason are also identified by applying our framework.