From D2D to Ds2D: Prolonging the Battery Life of Mobile Devices via Ds2D Communications

Emerging device-centric systems (DCSs) such as D2D communications are considered as a standard part of future mobile networks, where operators/ consumers involve the devices in direct communication to improve the cellular system throughput, latency, fairness, and energy efficiency. However, battery life of mobile devices involved in such communications is crucial for 5G smartphone users to explore the emerging applications in DCSs. It is anticipated that the owners of 5G-enabled smartphones will use their devices more extensively to talk, text, email, and surf the web more often than do customers with 4G smartphones or traditional handsets, which puts a significantly higher demand on the battery life. Smartphones are currently equipped with multiple radio interfaces that enable them to access different types of wireless networks including LTE-Direct and Wi-Fi-Direct, besides cellular networks. Such a capability is not well explored within the context of DCS. This article proposes a new scheme to support the emerging features in DCS where a D2D-enabled mobile device (a sink device or a file/ content requester) aggregates the radio resources of multiple mobile devices (source devices or file/content providers) via its multiple radio interfaces such that the scheme is referred to as devices-to-device (Ds2D) communications. The Ds2D communication scheme ensures an optimal packet split among the source mobile devices to improve the file/content transfer latency (FTL), energy efficiency, and battery life. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optimal packet split scheme among multiple source devices participating in Ds2D communication guarantees an improvement in mobile battery life over a wide range of data rate levels in comparison with the random packet split strategy and traditional D2D communication paradigm between the sink and source mobile devices.