Measurement results for cooperative device-to-device communication in cellular networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device communication is expected to be a part of future 5G networks. Many researchers have provided solid theoretical concepts to implement it, but a real practical solution is still in dearth. In this work, first the design and development of a proof-of-concept testbed for single carrier Device-to-Device (D2D) communication have been done. The results obtained from this testbed can be used to evaluate the subtle design issues associated with the real world deployment of single carrier D2D communication protocols. These issues are often overlooked in a theoretical or simulation framework. The performance of this light-weight, readily deployable testbed has been validated by emulating a cellular scenario in which a base station (BTS) and many D2D enabled devices coordinate and communicate with each other to select an optimum communication range, transmit parameters, intracellular localization and mode of communication. Through the experimental results it has been shown that D2D communication can significantly reduce the power consumption of a conventional cellular network. After this, another testbed (Multi-carrier) was developed using Software Defined radio which incorporates the concept of Spectrum Sharing through static sub-carrier allocation to D2D user by cellular system which will eventually enhance the performance of cellular as well as D2D communication system. Our purposed and deployed protocol have shown significant improvement (10% to 30% ) on Symbol Error Rate (SER) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) as compared with conventional direct transmission schemes.