Joint Subcarrier Assignment With Power Allocation for Sum Rate Maximization of D2D Communications in Wireless Cellular Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks have been recognized as a promising technology to improve the system capacity and spectral efficiency of 5G networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing the joint uplink subcarrier assignment and power allocation scheme to optimize the sumdata rate of D2D pairs, under a general "many-to-many" scenario in which a subcarrier could be shared by multiple D2D pairs and a D2D pair could also reuse multiple subcarriers. In particular, the optimization problem is to maximize the sum data rate of all D2D pairs under the constraints of minimum data rate requirements of cellular user equipments (CUEs). The formulated problem falls into a mixed integer nonlinear programming, which is generally NP-hard. To solve the problem, we decompose it into two subproblems: the subcarrier assignment subproblem and the power allocation subproblem. More specifically, we first propose an effective algorithm to assign subcarriers for both D2D pairs and CUEs under the assumption that the transmit power of each user is equally allocated among all the subcarriers. After that, we apply the successive convex approximation approach to transform the nonconvex power allocation problem into a sequence of convex problems, based on which an effective power allocation algorithm is designed. Simulations validate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the achievable sum data rate of D2D pairs, compared with the other existing schemes.