Churn Rate Aware Interference Management for Device-to-Device Communications in SDNs

Device-to-device (D2D) communications are employed in cellular networks to improve network coverage and spectral efficiency and reduce latency and power consumption. However, managing the interference between cellular and D2D users is a critical challenge. Recently in 5G cellular networks, the frameworks of software-defined networks (SDNs) and network function virtualization (NFV) are being utilized to implement stochastic algorithms and optimize the network's performance. However, most of these algorithms focus only on improving spectral efficiency and do not care about fairness in terms of serving the number of D2D users. In this work, we present two algorithms to manage the interference so that the churn rate, i.e., the ratio of the number of unserved to the total number of D2D users, can be minimized without affecting the quality of service (QoS) constraint of the cellular users. Using simulations, we corroborate that the proposed churn rate (CR) aware algorithms ensure fairness in allocating resources to the D2D users while maintaining the throughput performance.