A survey on interference management for Device-to-Device (D2D) communication and its challenges in 5G networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a promising concept to enhance the performance of devices by allowing direct transmission between closely located user pairs. The initial studies have proven that, direct communication will improve spectrum reuse, throughput, energy consumption, coverage, and reduce end to end latency. Additionally, it will enable the creation of new peer-to-peer services and location-based applications. Therefore, current research trends have revealed that D2D will be one of the technologies in next generation cellular network, i.e. 5G. However, introducing D2D to cellular network imposes various technical challenges. Interference management between cellular users and D2D users is considered to be one of the most critical issues when D2D is introduced to cellular network because D2D users share the same licensed spectrum with cellular users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the various state-of-the-art approaches for interference management in D2D communication enabled in cellular networks. Furthermore, we classify these interference management techniques based on their underlying approaches. Qualitative comparison between the various interference management techniques found that the existing approaches do not satisfy 5G requirements. To this end, the open challenge in introducing D2D to 5G cellular networks is provided at the end of this paper.