Spectral and Energy Efficiency of Uplink D2D Underlaid Massive MIMO Cellular Networks

One of the key 5G scenarios is that device-to-device (D2D) and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) will be co-existed. However, interference in the uplink D2D underlaid massive MIMO cellular networks needs to be coordinated, due to the vast cellular and D2D transmissions. To this end, this paper introduces a spatially dynamic power control solution for mitigating the cellular-to-D2D and D2D-to-cellular interference. In particular, the proposed D2D power control policy is rather flexible, including the special cases of no D2D links or using maximum transmit power. Under the considered power control, an analytical approach is developed to evaluate the spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) in such networks. Thus, the exact expressions of SE for a cellular user or D2D transmitter are derived, which quantify the impacts of key system parameters, such as massive MIMO antennas and D2D density. Moreover, the D2D scale properties are obtained, which provide the sufficient conditions for achieving the anticipated SE. Numerical results corroborate our analysis and show that the proposed power control solution can efficiently mitigate interference between the cellular and the D2D tier. The results demonstrate that there exists the optimal D2D density for maximizing the area SE of D2D tier. In addition, the achievable EE of a cellular user can be comparable with that of a D2D user.