Simulating Application Driven Mobile D2D underlay Networks using Gym API

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlay cellular network improves spectral efficiency by reusing cellular resources over short and low-power links between the devices. For this, the D2D paradigm is considered to be an integral part of all kinds of future networks and is an active area of research at different levels. This requires a simple, configurable, scalable, and realistic evaluation of the protocols proposed for the D2D networking paradigm. Although there exists a few platform to evaluate a D2D underlay network, they have one or more of the following drawbacks: (i) long development time and complex environment, (ii) limited support for mobility, (iii) no support for application specific development and evaluation. In this work, we developed a framework for simulating an application-driven mobile D2D underlay network using the Gym API, where D2D connections are made spontaneously based on the application requirements. The proposed framework includes modules for generating application-specific traffic, buffer for transmission and caching of application data, and mobility management. This complements several earlier works on application (or utility) driven resource allocation in D2D underlay network. The framework is used to evaluate a D2D network using different mobility models and performance of cache based video streaming in a D2D underlay network. Finally, the framework is compared with ns-3 and OMNET++ simulators and is observed to have lower CPU utilization and run-time under the same network settings.