Energy-efficiency maximization in D2D-enabled vehicular communications with consideration of dynamic channel information and fairness

Device-to-device (D2D) communications in a cellular network can be implemented on vehicular communications. However, high mobilities of vehicles generate fast channel variations in the communications. Channel description has to be specified in the D2D-enable vehicular communications network. In this paper, the vehicle speed and the sampling time are involved to the channel description such that the dynamic information of vehicle is integrated with the channel gain. By doing so, the channel description is more practical. The power control and spectrum sharing problem is formulated in order to maximize the energy-efficiency (EE) of total vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links. It also attempts to ensure reliable communications in a multi-cellular users multi-D2D users frequency division multiple access (FDMA) cellular environment. The reformulated objective function in the fractional form is proved to be quasi-concave, and it can be solved by the Dinkelbach method which requires low computational complexity. In addition, the Hungarian algorithm is used to determine the optimal match of cellular user equipments (CUEs) and V2V pairs. User fairness is further considered under the goal of maximizing overall energy efficiency. Then, the approach of minimum EE maximization is implemented on all V2I links in order to improve system fairness. Finally, the system performance of the proposed scheme is validated by numerical simulations. The results show that the algorithm is effective to improve the energy efficiency and robustness in the dynamic communications environment.