Enhanced Content Update Dissemination Through D2D in 5G Cellular Networks

Opportunistic traffic offloading has been proposed to tackle overload problems in cellular networks. However, existing proposals only address device-to-device-based offloading techniques with deadline-based data propagation, and neglect content injection procedures. In contrast, we tackle the offloading issue from another perspective: the base station interference coordination problem during content injection. In particular, we focus on dissemination of contents, and aim at the minimization of the total transmission time spent by base stations to inject the contents into the network. We leverage the almost blank sub-frame technique to keep under control the intercell interference in such a process. We formulate an optimization problem, prove that it is NP-hard and NP-complete, and propose a near-optimal heuristic to solve it. Our algorithm substantially outperforms classical intercell interference approaches, as we evaluate through the simulation of LTE-A networks.