Simple Clustering Methods for Multi-hop Cooperative Device-to-Device Communication

This paper studies the gain that cooperative multi-hop transmission provides when used to boost the data rate in Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. Both D2D transmitter and receiver are located in the coverage area of the same Macro Base Station, who is in charge of the control signaling to construct the cooperative cluster(s) of low-cost Relay Nodes (RNs) that Decode-and-Forward information non-coherently from source to destination. Communication resources are divided into two or three equal orthogonal parts for two-and three-hop cooperative transmissions, respectively. For the three-hop cooperative case, backward Interference Cancellation (IC) is also considered in the RNs of the first cluster to reduce multiplexing loss (using two orthogonal portions of communication resources instead of three). The end-to-end data rate of different multi-hop cooperative transmission strategies is studied for different clustering algorithms and measurement reports (i.e., SNR and SINR). Based on obtained performance results, it is possible to conclude that three-hop cooperative transmission with backward IC provides better performance than its two-hop counterpart.