Efficient spectrum management exploiting D2D communication in 5G systems

In the future standardization of the 5G networks, in Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 13 and beyond, Device-to-Device communications (D2D) is recognized as one of the key technologies that will support the 5G architecture. In fact, D2D can be exploited for different proximity-based services (ProSe) where the users discover their neighbors and benefit form different services like social applications, advertisement, public safety, and warning messages. In such a scenario, the aim is to manage in a proper way the radio spectrum and the energy consumption to provide high Quality of Experience (QoE) and better Quality of Services (QoS). To reach this goal, in this paper we propose a novel D2D-based uploading scheme in order to decrease the amount of radio resources needed to upload to the eNodeB a certain multimedia content. As a further improvement, the proposed scheme enhances the energy consumption of the users in the network, without affects the content uploading time. The obtained results show that our scheme achieves a gain of about 35% in term of mean radio resources used with respect to the standard LTE cellular approach. In addition, it is also 40 times more efficient in terms of energy consumption needed to upload the multimedia content.