Enabling D2D Communications Through Neighbor Discovery in LTE Cellular Networks

This work studies the problem of neighbor discovery for device-to-device (D2D) communications of LTE user equipments (UEs) in a modern cellular network. By listening to cellular uplink transmissions, UEs can detect potential D2D partners through a neighbor discovery process compatible with the standard LTE network protocol. We focus on neighbor discovery utilizing sounding reference signal (SRS) channel, which can be accessed by peer UEs that are LTE-compliant. Under the constraint of unknown channel statistics during uplink hearing, we propose joint neighbor detection and D2D channel estimation for listening UEs using the framework of sparse channel recovery. Composite hypothesis testing methods are further developed to refine neighbor detection accuracy. We evaluate the performance of our neighbor discovery methods under various network parameters to facilitate practical design and implementation of D2D in 4G cellular networks.