Wireless cellular networks feature two emerging technological trends. The first is the direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, which enables direct links between the wireless devices that reutilize the cellular spectrum and radio interface. The second is that of Machine-Type Communications (MTC), where the objective is to attach a large number of low-rate low-power devices, termed Machine-Type Devices (MTDs) to the cellular network. MTDs pose new challenges to the cellular network, one if which is that the low transmission power can lead to outage problems for the cell-edge devices. Another issue imminent to MTC is the that can lead to overload of the radio interface. In this paper we explore the opportunity opened by D2D links for supporting MTDs, since it can be desirable to carry the MTC traffic not through direct links to a Base Station, but through a nearby relay. MTC is modeled as a fixed-rate traffic with an outage requirement. We propose two network-assisted D2D schemes that enable the cooperation between MTDs and standard cellular devices, thereby meeting the MTC outage requirements while maximizing the rate of the broadband services for the other devices. The proposed schemes apply the principles Opportunistic Interference Cancellation and the Cognitive Radio's underlaying. We show through analysis and numerical results the gains of the proposed schemes.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of spectrally efficient operation of a cognitive radio, also called secondary spectrum user, under an interference from the primary system. A secondary receiver observes a multiple access channel of two users, the secondary and the primary transmitter, respectively. The secondary receiver applies Opportunistic Interference Cancelation (OIC) and Suboptimal Opportunistic Interference Cancelation (S-OIC) thus decoding the primary signal when such an opportunity is created by the rate selected at the primary transmitter and the power received from the primary transmitter. First, we investigate how the secondary transmitter, when using OIC and S-OIC for fixed transmitting power, should select its rate in order to meet its target outage probability under different assumptions about the channel-state-information available at the secondary transmitter. We study three different cases and for each of them identify the region of achievable primary and secondary rates. Second, we determine how the secondary transmitter should select its transmitting power not to violate the target outage probability at the primary terminals. Our numerical results show that the best secondary performance is always obtained when the secondary transmitter knows the instantaneous channel-state-information toward the intended receiver. We also evaluate the degradation in terms of achievable rate at the secondary receiver when it uses suboptimal decoding (S-OIC rather than OIC) and the interplay between the allowed power at the secondary transmitter (which depends on the target outage probability at the primary receiver) and the decodability at the secondary receiver.