D2D Relay Selection and Fairness on 5G Wireless Networks
Oscar Delgado, Fabrice Labeau · 2016
Wireless cellular networks aim to operate efficiently in low and high SINR regions while maximizing the overall network capacity. Nevertheless, achieving high capacity in all regions is opposed to being fair with all mobile devices. i.e., it is well known that, due to the nature of wireless communications, the effective channel capacity at the cell edge is significantly smaller than at the cell center. We consider a wireless cellular network where mobile devices have multiple network interfaces and are capable to relay traffic. In this paper we investigate: 1) How the use of a mobile device as a relay can improve the traffic fairness, 2) How to maximize the overall network capacity, and 3) How to devise the best relay selection strategy. We propose a greedy algorithm that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by appropriately selecting the mobile devices that will act as relays. Our simulation results indicate that using mobile devices as relays not only helps to improve the Jain's fairness by around 8% but also increases the average network capacity by 20% while reducing the transmission power consumption by 80%.