Energy- and Spectral- Efficiency Tradeoff for D2D-Multicasts in Underlay Cellular Networks

Underlay in-band device-to-device (D2D) multicast communication, where the same content is disseminated via direct links in a group, has the potential to improve the spectral and energy efficiencies of cellular networks. However, most of the existing approaches for this problem only address either spectral efficiency (SE) or energy efficiency (EE). We study the tradeoff between SE and EE in a single cell D2D integrated cellular network, where multiple D2D multicast groups (MGs) may share the uplink channel with multiple cellular users (CUs). We formulate the EE maximization problem with constraint on SE and maximum available transmission power. A power allocation algorithm is proposed to solve this problem and its efficacy is demonstrated via extensive numerical simulations. The tradeoff between SE and EE as a function of density of D2D MGs, and maximum transmission power of a MG is characterized.