Device-to-Device Data Transfer Through Multihop Relay Links Underlaying Cellular Networks

With the increasing demand for high-data mobile traffic and applications, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has emerged as a promising technique for next generation of cellular networks to increase the network capacity. In this paper, to offload traffic from network backhaul, we investigate the problem of relaying data through multihop nodes, using D2D communication, for a set of transmitter-receiver pairs, by sharing cellular resource blocks. Furthermore, the problem is extended to schedule the transmission links within a maximum time frame to obey a delay constraint. If the transmission path could not be scheduled within the maximum time frame for any D2D communication pair, the communication is redirected through the base station similar to cellular mode. Our problem aims at minimizing the overall D2D transmission power by giving priority to maximizing the number of paths that go through D2D relaying. We mathematically formulate the above problem and find optimal solutions for small networks. We show the NP-hardness of the problem, and owing to its complexity, we propose an algorithmic method for more extensive networks. Through numerical results, the performance of our mathematical optimization model and algorithm is compared and the efficiency of the proposed algorithmic method is shown.