Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Cellular Communications Systems

TLDR

Local peer‑to‑peer communication can replace central servers for rich multimedia, but in a multi‑cell environment the main challenge is limiting interference to the cellular network while maintaining a sufficient link budget. The paper proposes a Device‑to‑Device radio that operates as an underlay to an IMT‑Advanced cellular network, aiming to enable local peer‑to‑peer communication without compromising cellular performance. A novel power‑control scheme limits D2D transmit power by exploiting cellular uplink power‑control information, and the authors evaluate it in a single‑cell scenario with one device–base‑station link and two D2D links. The scheme allows full‑load underlay D2D operation without degrading cellular throughput, and the results show that the shared‑resource D2D radio achieves higher sum‑rate capacity than pure cellular transmission.

Abstract

In this article we propose to facilitate local peer-to-peer communication by a Device-to-Device (D2D) radio that operates as an underlay network to an IMT-Advanced cellular network. It is expected that local services may utilize mobile peer-to-peer communication instead of central server based communication for rich mul-timedia services. The main challenge of the underlay radio in a multi-cell environment is to limit the inter-ference to the cellular network while achieving a reasonable link budget for the D2D radio. We propose a novel power control mechanism for D2D connections that share cellular uplink resources. The mechanism limits the maximum D2D transmit power utilizing cellular power control information of the devices in D2D communication. Thereby it enables underlaying D2D communication even in interference-limited networks with full load and without degrading the performance of the cellular network. Secondly, we study a single cell scenario consisting of a device communicating with the base station and two devices that communicate with each other. The results demonstrate that the D2D radio, sharing the same resources as the cellular net-work, can provide higher capacity (sum rate) compared to pure cellular communication where all the data is transmitted through the base station.