AbstractAlthough centralised‐control schemes for device‐to‐device (D2D) underlay communications can produce satisfactory results by efficiently managing the interference between cellular and D2D transmissions, they can become prohibitively complicated and may require a large amount of feedbacks from devices, because it is important to handle the inter‐cell interference as well as the intra‐cell interference. Such a burden can be alleviated by a distributed‐control mechanism, in which a base station performs the resource management of its cellular devices and each D2D device selects its own resource without a small‐scale control of the cellular network. This paper addresses interference issues in distributed‐control D2D underlay systems and presents an interference mitigation technique based on frequency spreading, in order to meet the target outage probability. This paper also proposes a simple estimation scheme, which can be used for the mode selection and the determination of D2D transmission parameters. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.