Intracluster Device-to-Device Relay Algorithm With Optimal Resource Utilization

Device-to-device (D2D) communications help improve the performance of wireless multicast services in cellular networks via cooperative retransmissions among multicast recipients within a cluster. Resource utilization efficiency should be taken into account in the design of D2D communication systems. To maximize resource efficiency of D2D retransmissions, there is a tradeoff between multichannel diversity and multicast gain. In this paper, by analyzing the relationship between the number of relays and minimal time-frequency resource cost on retransmissions, we derive a closed-form probability density function (pdf) for an optimal number of D2D relays. Motivated by the analysis, we then propose an intracluster D2D retransmission scheme with optimized resource utilization, which can adaptively select the number of cooperative relays performing multicast retransmissions and give an iterative subcluster partition algorithm to enhance retransmission throughput. Exploiting both multichannel diversity and multicast gain, the proposed scheme achieves a significant gain in terms of resource utilization if compared with its counterparts with a fixed number of relays.