Experimental Analysis of Device-to-Device Communication

In Long-Term-Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) cellular networks, the devices present in close proximity can communicate directly without going through the base station. This technology is known as device-to-device (D2D) communication. Higher spectral efficiency, low latency and enhanced throughput, etc. are some of the major features of D2D communication as compared to the conventional cellular communication. In this paper, we analyze the performance of D2D communication by using OMNeT++ simulator under SimuLTE platform. We consider the case of static devices as well as mobile devices. We experiment with the D2D mode, infrastructure mode and relay-aided D2D mode. We find that for short distances, D2D affords higher throughput than infrastructure mode. When the distance increases beyond a threshold, one can use relay-aided D2D communication to achieve throughput higher than that in infrastructure mode. Relay mode also gives superior performance than direct and infrastructure modes when the communicating devices are mobile.