Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Cellular Networks

It is expected that device-to-device (D2D) communication is allowed to underlay future cellular networks such as IMT-Advanced for spectrum efficiency. This article studies the mechanisms of D2D communication and interference avoidance when the D2D subsystem reuses uplink resources and downlink spectrums with a cellular system, respectively. We firstly propose an effective scheme to establish and maintain D2D communication. Moreover, a novel method to deal with the resource allocation and interference avoidance issues by utilizing the network peculiarity of a hybrid network to share the uplink resource is proposed. Most research focuses on reusing the uplink spectrums, but how to share the downlink frequency bands is seldom addressed. To share the downlink spectrums and avoid the interference to the primary cellular devices, a labeled time slots based mechanism is proposed. Implementation details are described in a real cellular system and simulation results prove that satisfying performance can be achieved by using the proposed mechanisms.