This paper addresses the benefits of introducing exclusion regions around both transmitters and receivers in D2D wireless networks. Such exclusion regions offer protection from interference at the expense of a sparser spatial reuse of spectrum, bringing about a tradeoff whose resolution entails optimizing the size of the exclusion regions as function of relevant system parameters. Our figure of merit for this optimization is the spectral efficiency. We first characterize this quantity for a given size of the exclusion regions, and then proceed to its optimization, altogether establishing the major benefits of incorporating properly sized exclusion regions in the applicable scheduling algorithms.

This work was supported in part by Intel’s University Research Program/n“5G: Transforming the Wireless User Experience” and by the MINECO/nProject TEC2012-34642.