Proportional fair scheduling using water-filling technique for SC-FDMA based D2D communication

The resource allocation in SC-FDMA is constrained by the condition that multiple subchannels should be allocated to a single user only if they are adjacent. Therefore, the scheduling scheme of a D2D-cellular system that uses SC-FDMA must also conform to the so-called adjacency constraint. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity that applies proportional fair (PF) scheduling in the D2D-cellular system. The proposed algorithm consists of two main phases: (i) subchannel allocation and (ii) adjustment of data rates, which are executed for both CUEs and DUEs. In the subchannel allocation phase for CUEs (or D2D pairs), the users’ data rates are maximized via optimal power allocation to frequency-contiguous subchannels. In the second phase, a PF scheduling problem is solved to decide the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) of both CUEs and D2D pairs. Both phases of the proposed algorithm benefit from the Water-Filling (WF) technique. The simulation results suggest that the proposed scheme performs similar to optimal PF scheduling from the perspective of users’ data rate and their logarithmic sum. An additional benefit of the proposed scheme is its low computational overhead.