ITLinQ+: An improved spectrum sharing mechanism for device-to-device communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communication enables proximity-based applications by exchanging information directly between nearby devices without routing through the cellular infrastructure. In this work, we propose a low-complexity distributed link scheduling and power control mechanism (ITLinQ+) for spectrum sharing in D2D networks, inspired by recent findings showing that power control and treating interference as Gaussian noise achieves rates close to the information-theoretic capacity region of the underlying interference channel under some conditions on the channel strengths. We show that ITLinQ+ substantially improves the average sum-throughput over other state-of-the-art schemes, such as FlashLinQ and the recently proposed ITLinQ. In particular, the new scheme provides large gains in terms of power efficiency.