Performance Comparison of Practical Resource Allocation Schemes for Device-to-Device Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications in cellular spectrum have the potential of increasing the spectral and energy efficiency by taking advantage of the proximity and reuse gains. Although several resource allocation (RA) and power control (PC) schemes have been proposed in the literature, a comparison of the performance of such algorithms as a function of the available channel state information has not been reported. In this paper, we examine which large scale channel gain knowledge is needed by practically viable RA and PC schemes for network assisted D2D communications. To this end, we propose a novel near-optimal and low-complexity RA scheme that can be advantageously used in tandem with the optimal binary power control scheme and compare its performance with three heuristics-based RA schemes that are combined either with the well-known 3GPP Long-Term Evolution open-loop path loss compensating PC or with an iterative utility optimal PC scheme. When channel gain knowledge about the useful as well as interfering (cross) channels is available at the cellular base station, the near-optimal RA scheme, termed Matching, combined with the binary PC scheme is superior. Ultimately, we find that the proposed low-complexity RA + PC tandem that uses some cross-channel gain knowledge provides superior performance.