Device-to-Device Communications Enabled Multicast Scheduling with the Multi-level Codebook in mmWave Small Cells

To keep up with the rapid growth of mobile data, there are increasing interests to deploy small cells in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to underlay the conventional homogeneous macrocell network as well as in exploiting device-to-device (D2D) communications to improve the efficiency of the multicast service that supports content-based mobile applications. To compensate for high propagation loss in the mmWave band, high-gain directional antennas have to be employed, while it is critical to optimize multicast service in order to improve the network performance. In this paper, we develop an efficient multicast scheduling scheme for small cells in the mmWave band, called MD2D, where both D2D communications in close proximity and multi-level antenna codebook are utilized. Specifically, a user partition and multicast path planning algorithm is proposed to partition the users in the multicast group into subsets and to determine the transmission node for each subset, so as to achieve optimal utilization of D2D communications and multi-level antenna codebook. Then a multicast scheduling algorithm schedules the transmission for each subset. Furthermore, in order to optimize the network performance, the optimal choice of user partition thresholds is analyzed. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the MD2D achieves the best performance, in terms of network throughput and energy efficiency, compared with other existing state-of-the-art schemes. MD2D improves the network throughput compared with the second-best scheme by about 27%.