Cooperative Device-to-Device Communications Achieve Maximum Throughput and Maximum Fairness in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic schedulers such as MaxRate and Proportional Fair are known for trading off throughput and fairness of users in cellular networks. In this paper we show how to achieve maximum fairness without sacrificing throughput. We propose a novel solution that integrates opportunistic scheduling design principles and cooperative device-to-device communication capabilities in order to improve both fairness and capacity in cellular networks. We develop a mathematical approach and design a smart tie-breaking mechanism which enhances the fairness achieved by the MaxRate scheduler. We show that users that cooperatively form clusters benefit from both higher throughput and fairness. Our scheduling mechanism is simple to implement and scales linearly with the number of clusters, and is able to achieve equal or better fairness than Proportional Fair schedulers.