Leveraging D2D communication to maximize the spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO systems

Asma Afzal , Afef Feki (1) , Merouane Debbah (2) , Syed Ali Zaidi , Mounir Ghogho (3) , Des Mclernon (4)

1 Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs
2 LANEAS - Large Networks and Systems Group
3 FSR - Faculté des sciences de Rabat
4 School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering

In this article, we investigate how the performance of Massive MIMO cellular systems can be enhanced by introducing D2D communication. We consider a scenario where the base station (BS) is equipped with large, but finite number of antennas and the total number of UEs is kept fixed. The key design question is that what fraction of users should be offloaded to D2D mode in order to maximize the aggregate cell level throughput. We demonstrate that there exists an optimal user offload fraction, which maximizes the overall capacity. This fraction is strongly coupled with the network parameters such as the number of antennas at the BS, D2D link distance and the transmit SNR at both the UE and the BS and careful tuning of the offload fraction can provide up to 5× capacity gains.

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

Asma Afzal, Afef Feki, Merouane Debbah, Syed Ali Zaidi, Mounir Ghogho, et al.. Leveraging D2D communication to maximize the spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO systems. 15th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2017), May 2017, Paris, France. ⟨10.23919/WIOPT.2017.7959929⟩. ⟨hal-01784929⟩