Exploiting interference alignment for sum rate enhancement in D2D-enabled cellular networks

Spectrally-efficient and low-latency support of local media services is expected to be provided by enabling underlay direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communication mode in future cellular networks. Interference Alignment (IA) can enhance the capacity of a wireless network by providing more degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose using IA techniques in a D2D underlay network to enhance spectral efficiency. We compare IA transmission and traditional point-to-point (P2P) transmission from the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) and sum-rate points of view. Furthermore, we propose three grouping schemes for the D2D users into groups of 3-pairs such that IA can be applied using a limited number of signal extensions. Results demonstrate that although traditional P2P transmission can achieve better BER performance; IA transmission is still able to achieve gains in the sum rate. Also, system simulations show that the cell total D2D sum rate can be improved using IA. A gain of up to 31.8% is shown to be attainable at a reasonable transmit signal power level.