Mode Switching for Energy-Efficient Device-to-Device Communications in Cellular Networks

This paper investigates energy-efficient device-to-device (D2D) communications in cellular networks. We aim to maximize the overall energy-efficiency (EE) of D2D users and regular cellular users (RCUs) while considering the circuit power consumption and the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for both types of users as well as power constraints. Three transmission modes, namely, dedicated mode, reusing mode, and cellular mode, are considered for D2D users to share spectrum with RCUs. Parametric Dinkelbach method and concave-convex procedure (CCCP) are adopted to transform the original optimization problems into more tractable forms through sequential convex approximations. Then, interior point method is exploited to obtain the optimal solution. Simulation results show that system EE can be improved significantly with the proposed mode switching algorithm compared with the single mode transmission. Besides, it is also shown that the reusing mode is more preferred in the EE based mode switching while it is the dedicated mode in the spectrum-efficiency (SE) based mode switching in most situations.