Mobile Edge Computing Discovery for Device-to-Device Communication in 5G

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is one of the promising technologies for future fifth-generation cellular networks (5G). The first step to enable D2D communication is to discover neighbor devices and choose which will establish a D2D communication link. The limited battery life, discovery resources and the growing number of devices bind the current discovery protocols, so we need to find a new discovery protocol that goes with the next 5G cellular network. In this paper, we propose a new discovery protocol "MEC Discovery" based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) for D2D communication in 5G. The MEC server will discover neighbor devices for a User Equipment (UE) when requested and keep track of discovered devices in case other UEs ask for the same information with D2D mode in the near future. Our simulation results indicate a huge dropping in power consumption by the UE and reduced interferences caused by many devices doing discovery simultaneously in the same area.