Joint DL/UL Decoupled Cell-Association and Resource Allocation in D2D-Underlay HetNets

With the rise of data-hungry applications and the rapid development of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), 5G and device-to-device (D2D) communications come into being. While such technologies are designed to support massive data access to meet the ever-increasing demands, the complexity and heterogeneity of the network structure bring bigger challenges for interference management. As such, downlink/uplink decoupling (DUDe) has become an attractive approach, as it offloads user equipments (UEs) to small-cells (SCells) and creates a more benign environment for D2D communication. In this paper, we investigate the application of DUDe in D2D-underlay heterogeneous networks, and propose an efficient joint cell-association, subchannel allocation, and power control scheme for network sum-rate maximization. The proposed scheme includes a minimum path-loss based DUDe to decide the uplink (UL) serving base-station, and a greedy coloring scheme with modified Munkres algorithm to cluster the UEs, and allocate subchannels. Furthermore, the difference of convex functions based programming algorithm for power control is utilized to maximize the network sum-rate while satisfying the UE transmit power and data rate constraints. The results presented show that the proposed scheme can achieve superior performance to the coupled benchmarks.