Cooperative Device-to-Device (D2D) Forwarding Algorithms for Improving Data Dissemination Efficiency in Cellular Networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a new technology that allows mobile terminals communicate with each other directly by using the licensed frequency resources under the control of cellular networks. D2D communications help to improve the efficiency of data dissemination services in cellular networks, via enabling cooperative inter-recipient data forwarding within a D2D cluster. However, the existing D2D forwarding algorithms do not take into account the heterogeneity of D2D channel capacity, and thus the resource utilization efficiency can not be maximized. In this paper, a cooperative multi-hop D2D forwarding algorithm which includes multicast and unicast modes is proposed. The proposed algorithm can fully exploit the multi-channel diversity gain by adaptively selecting the optimal relay, routing and hops of D2D transmission according to the D2D channel conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant gain in terms of resource utilization efficiency and therefore improves greatly the throughput of cellular data dissemination.