Performance Analysis of Co- and Cross-tier Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Macro-small Cell Wireless Networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying macro-small cell networks, as one of the promising technologies in the era of 5G, is able to improve spectral efficiency and increase system capacity. In this paper, we model the cross- and co-tier D2D communications in two-tier macro-small cell networks. To avoid the complicated interference for cross-tier D2D, we propose a mode selection scheme with a dedicated resource sharing strategy. For co-tier D2D, we formulate a joint optimization problem of power control and resource reuse with the aim of maximizing the overall outage capacity. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, we devise a heuristic algorithm to obtain a suboptimal solution and reduce the computational complexity. System-level simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can provide enhanced system performance and guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) of all devices in two-tier macro-small cell networks. In addition, our study reveals the high potential of introducing cross- and co-tier D2D in small cell networks: i) cross-tier D2D obtains better performance at low and medium small cell densities than co-tier D2D, and ii) co-tier D2D achieves a steady performance improvement with the increase of small cell density.