Device-to-device communications in the millimeter wave band: A novel distributed mechanism

In spite of its potential advantages, the large-scale implementation of the device-to-device (D2D) communications has yet to be realized, mainly due to severe interference and lack of enough bandwidth in the microwave (μW) band. Recently, exploiting the millimeter wave (mmW) band for D2D communications has attracted considerable attention as a potential solution to these challenges. However, its severe sensitivity to blockage along with its directional nature make the utilization of the mmW band a challenging task as it requires line-of-sight (LOS) link detection and careful beam alignment between the D2D transceivers. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed mechanism which enables the D2D devices to discover unblocked LOS links for the mmW band communication. Moreover, as such LOS links are not always available, the proposed mechanism allows the D2D devices to switch to the μW band if necessary. In addition, the proposed mechanism detects the direction of the LOS links to perform the beam alignment. We have used tools from stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism in terms of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) coverage probability. The performance of the proposed algorithm is then compared to the one of the single band (i.e., μW/mmW) communication. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism considerably outperforms the single band communication.