Cooperative Communication Resource Allocation Strategies for 5G and Beyond Networks: A Review of Architecture, Challenges and Opportunities

The fifth-generation mobile network (5G) supports Internet of Things (IoT) devices and processes large-scale data volumes through mobile devices. With this facility, we find a novel concept of Cooperative communication that manages massive channels accessibility, heterogeneous networks, complex interference environments and high energy consumption mediums through high signal coverage and capacity among mobile devices. The core of cooperative communication system relies on resource allocation techniques that achieves robust interference management, resource scheduling and user matching. To this extend, we find several strategies that discuss cooperative communication allocation techniques from various technological aspects. This review paper compiles all such strategies and discusses cooperative communication resource allocation techniques in a broader scope. The review is designed in such a systematic way that, at first, we classify cooperative communication process according to the number of relay nodes, signal forwarding mode, and transceiver diversity gain. After that, we discuss the core technologies of cooperative communication that includes channel multiplexing, relay selection, power allocation. Followed by that, we discuss the network model of the 5G cooperative communication system having spectrum sharing, new antenna technology, and NOMA along with the several application case studies. In addition to that, we also brief about the resource allocation algorithms of the 5G cooperative communication system from both the certain and uncertain channel states. Finally, we conclude the review discussing the current applied architecture of 5G cooperative communication resource allocation along with challenges, opportunities and open problems.