Interference-aware multi-hop path selection for device-to-device communications in a cellular interference environment

摘要

Device-to-device (D2D) communications are widely seen as an efficient network capacity scaling technology. The co-existence of D2D with conventional cellular (CC) transmissions causes unwanted interference. Existing techniques have focused on improving the throughput of D2D communications by optimising the radio-resource management and power allocation. However, very little is understood about the impact of the route selection of the users and how optimal routing can reduce interference and improve the overall network capacity. In fact, traditional wisdom indicates that minimising the number of hops or the total path distance is preferable. Yet, when interference is considered, the authors show that this is not the case. In this study, they show that by understanding the location of the user an interference-aware-routing (IAR) algorithm can be devised. They propose an adaptive IAR algorithm that on average achieves a 30% increase in hop distance, but can improve the overall network capacity by 50% whilst only incurring a minor 2% degradation to the CC capacity. The analysis framework and the results open up new avenues of research in location-dependent optimisation in wireless systems, which is particularly important for increasingly dense and semantic-aware deployments.