Resource allocation based on clustering for D2D communications in underlaying cellular networks

In cellular networks, proximity users may communicate directly without going through the infrastructure such as the base station (BS), which is device-to-device (D2D) communications, and it can improve spectral efficiency. However, enabling D2D communications in a cellular network poses two major challenges. First, the BS is suffered from signaling overhead. Second, D2D transmitters may cause harmful interference to the primary cellular network when radio resources are shared between them. In order to resolve the problems, we introduce clustering algorithms and resource allocation method in two stage. In the first stage, we introduce similarity measure based clustering algorithms for reducing the BS signaling overhead. In the second stage, we formulate a problem to maximize the spatial reuse efficiency by allowing the data transmission of D2D pairs on the same resources. Simulation results show that the proposed AP based clustering scheme outperforms the other schemes for different configurations of D2D pairs in underlaying cellular networks. It is also shown that not only does the proposed resource allocation scheme improve the network performance via coordination of cochannel interference, but more importantly the proposed clustering scheme reduces the complexity of implementation by simple message exchanging.