Online Algorithms for Optimal Resource Management in Dynamic D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications has recently emerged as a promising technology for boosting the capacity of cellular systems. D2D enables direct communication between mobile devices over the cellular band without utilizing infrastructure nodes such as base stations, thereby reducing the load on cellular base stations and increasing network throughput through spatial reuse of radio resources. Hence it is important to optimally allocate these radio resources. Furthermore, since the composition of a cellular macro cell is highly dynamic, it is critical to adaptively update the resource allocation for D2D communications rather than recomputing it from scratch. In this work, we develop the first online algorithm, namely ODSRA, for dynamic resource allocation while maximizing spatial reuse. At the core of the resource allocation problem is the online set multicover problem, for which we present the first deterministic O (log n log m)-competitive online algorithm, where n is the number of elements, and m the number of sets. By simulation, we show the efficacy of ODSRA by analyzing network throughput and other metrics, obtaining a large improvement in running time over offline methods.