High Throughput Opportunistic Cooperative Device-to-Device Communications With Caching

To achieve the potential in providing high throughput for cellular networks by device-to-device (D2D) communications, the interference among D2D links should be carefully managed. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic cooperation strategy for D2D transmission by exploiting the caching capability at the users to control the interference among D2D links. We consider overlay inband D2D, divide the D2D users into clusters, and assign different frequency bands to cooperative and non-cooperative D2D links. To provide high opportunity for cooperative transmission, we introduce a caching policy. To maximize the network throughput, we jointly optimize the cluster size and bandwidth allocation, where the closed-form expression of the bandwidth allocation factor is obtained. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can provide 400%-500% throughput gain over traditional D2D communications when the content popularity distribution is skewed, and can provide 60%-80% gain even when the content popularity distribution is uniform.