System utility based resource allocation for D2D multicast communication in software-defined cellular networks

Device-to-device (D2D) multicast communication is a useful way to improve the communication efficiency of local services. This study considers a scenario of D2D multicast communication in software defined cellular network and investigates the frequency resource allocation problem. Firstly, we build the system model and formulate the optimization problem. Secondly, a hierarchical scheme to achieve a suboptimal solution is proposed. To select appropriate user equipments (UEs) as potential D2D transmitters (PDTs), a social aware PDT selection method is proposed. Then, a resource allocation algorithm considering users' priorities is proposed. Furthermore, to study the resource allocation for general system that UEs without priorities, a non-priority considered allocation algorithm is proposed also. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed schemes are effective in improving the system utility and reducing the resource consuming for D2D communications.