Multi-Hop Relay-Aided Underlay D2D Communications for Improving Cellular Coverage Quality

The future wireless networks need to improve spectrum and energy efficiency to satisfy the increasing demand for high data rate. Device-to device (D2D) communications have the ability to address this problem. This paper focuses on the underlay D2D relay function to improve cellular coverage quality. Although there are a few relevant works in this aspect, there is room for further improvement. For example, there is the constraint on the number of relays in a transmission path, which hardly meets the requirement of the cell-edge devices to fully improve their cellular throughput. Also, there is little energy constraint for underlay D2D relay selection, which is difficult to guarantee the service life of underlay D2D relaying links. Furthermore, without careful regulation of transmission power in terms of cellular coverage improvement, it is not conducive to the improvement of spectrum and energy efficiency in this aspect. Therefore, this paper proposes the improved scheme to deal with these problems, which can: 1) improve spectrum efficiency by using underlay spectrum sharing mode and alleviating its weakness (e.g., co-channel interference); 2) enhance comprehensive performance of underlay D2D relaying links by jointly considering multiple Quality-of-Service (QoS) metrics; 3) reduce overhead of relay selection by proposing a greedy algorithm based on a distributed local search; and 4) improve both energy efficiency and convergence time by designing a new power adjustment scheme based on the improved potential game decision algorithm. The theoretical analysis proves the existence of Nash equilibrium, and the simulation results show that the proposed game decision algorithm accelerates convergence and the proposed whole scheme improves cellular coverage quality.