Impact of Power Allocation on Device-to-Device Discovery Processes

Device to device (D2D) communications is one of the key-technologies for advanced releases of LTE and 5G. The centralized base station (or eNodeB), which controls everything in traditional mobile networks, cannot be the only solution when the number of mobile users and devices increase, causing service outages, low spectral efficiency, and high latency. An important technology that can help to solve some of the issues related to traffic overhead and to fulfill the requirements of 5G is D2D communication. In this paper, we focus on D2D communication in a 5G decentralized emergency scenario, where decentralized means that there is no communication or control from the eNodeB. One of the main issues in D2D communications, is the efficiency of the discovery process between couples of devices able to interconnect directly, especially in the decentralized case. In this context, we explore and compare the impact of different power allocation strategies with increasing numbers of D2D devices and different system parameters.