Resource management schemes for network assisted device-to-device communication for an integrated OFDMA cellular system

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has been a hot research topic in the recent years. Among different D2D use cases, the integration of D2D and conventional cellular network is one of the most attractive schemes. This approach has been investigated in recent academic and standardization studies, since such a combination improves the efficiency of the overall system in both resource and power domains. It also improves the coverage of the cellular network and improves the cell edge performance. In this paper, such a system combining D2D and OFDMA/SC-FDMA based cellular network is investigated, targeting at simple and effective resource management algorithms. The network level performance of a system using proposed algorithms is evaluated by simulations. We propose the use of separate resource pools for cellular and D2D UEs, with in-cell resource reuse utilizing the D2D resource pool. This is shown to provide significant gains in terms of spectrum efficiency and network level performance, especially at the cell edge.