Modeling and Analysis on Access Control for Device-to-Device Communications in Cellular Network: A Network-Calculus-Based Approach

Device-to-device (D2D) communication plays a crucial role in improving the performance of cellular systems, and it is expected to be an innovative technology for next-generation wireless systems. Although significant progress has been made toward cellular and D2D coexistence, the issue of access control for D2D communications in the cellular network has received limited attention. In this paper, we address this issue by employing the network calculus (NC) theory for the first time. We propose a multipriority model, which assigns the strictly highest priority to cellular users and multiple levels of priority to D2D users to characterize the communication requests' access. The proposed model facilitates interference avoidance between cellular and D2D communications and, thus, enhances the quality of service (QoS) of the cellular system. We also apply the NC theory to analyze the worst-case performance of service rate, delay, and backlog for processing communication requests of cellular and D2D users. Both theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective and applicable to characterize the access control for D2D communications underlaying cellular networks.