Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for D2D Communications in Cellular Networks

In this paper, we study the energy-efficient resource allocation problem for device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks, which aims to maximize the minimum weighted energy efficiency of D2D links while guaranteeing minimum data rates for cellular links. We first characterize the optimal power allocation of the cellular links to transform the original resource allocation problem into the joint subchannel and power allocation problem for D2D links. We then propose three resource allocation algorithms with different complexity levels, namely, dual-based, branch-and-bound (BnB), and relaxation-based rounding (RBR) algorithms. While the dual-based algorithm solves the problem by using the dual decomposition method, the BnB and RBR algorithms tackle the problem by employing the relaxation approach. We establish the strong performance guarantees for the proposed algorithms through theoretical analysis. Extensive numerical studies demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve superior performance and significantly outperform a conventional algorithm.