Indoor Propagation Effects in D2D Communication: 5G Applications and Coverage Analysis

We study a practical simulation set-up of indoor device-to-device (D2D) communications scenario for fifth generation (5G) applications to analyse the effects of power level variations, path-loss, and the impact of transmission through direct and indirect communication links. We provide a simulation based analysis considering a generalized indoor office building for the context of D2D indoor communication with line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight communication links. We show the effect of power level on the transmission, variation of the connectivity probability with the change in the number of receivers, and also consider the impact on connectivity of modeling the network as a mesh where the users act as relays. The simulation is performed at different operating frequencies including the 5G frequency range and for different path loss functions. We present the coverage analysis by taking actual measurements for an office setup, validating it through simulations, and show that the network coverage extends with the D2D communications. Furthermore, we observe that, as the number of users increases, the number of users able to access the network also increases, but with D2D communication included, that number approaches between 80% and 100% at 2.4 GHz, or around 50% to 90% at 5.8 GHz, in the presented scenario.