  Network-assisted single-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication can increase
the spectral and energy efficiency of cellular networks by taking advantage of
the proximity, reuse, and hop gains when radio resources are properly managed
between the cellular and D2D layers. In this paper we argue that D2D technology
can be used to further increase the spectral and energy efficiency if the key
D2D radio resource management algorithms are suitably extended to support
network assisted multi-hop D2D communications. Specifically, we propose a
novel, distributed utility maximizing D2D power control (PC) scheme that is
able to balance spectral and energy efficiency while taking into account mode
selection and resource allocation constraints that are important in the
integrated cellular-D2D environment. Our analysis and numerical results
indicate that multi-hop D2D communications combined with the proposed PC scheme
can be useful not only for harvesting the potential gains previously identified
in the literature, but also for extending the coverage of cellular networks.
