Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews device-to-device (D2D) communication in cellular networks, highlighting its benefits, challenges, key technologies, and standardization efforts to meet future network demands.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of D2D communication, including open issues, technological advancements, and potential architectures for next-generation networks.

Findings

D2D enhances network capacity and data rates.

Key challenges include peer discovery and resource allocation.

Various technologies like mmWave and UDNs are integral to D2D.

Abstract

A constant need to increase the network capacity for meeting the growing demands of the subscribers has led to the evolution of cellular communication networks from the first generation (1G) to the fifth generation (5G). There will be billions of connected devices in the near future. Such a large number of connections are expected to be heterogeneous in nature, demanding higher data rates, lesser delays, enhanced system capacity and superior throughput. The available spectrum resources are limited and need to be flexibly used by the mobile network operators (MNOs) to cope with the rising demands. An emerging facilitator of the upcoming high data rate demanding next generation networks (NGNs) is device-to-device (D2D) communication. An extensive survey on device-to-device (D2D) communication has been presented in this paper, including the plus points it offers, the key open issues associated with it like peer discovery, resource allocation etc, demanding special attention of the research community, some of its integrant technologies like millimeter wave D2D (mmWave), ultra dense networks (UDNs), cognitive D2D, handover procedure in D2D and its numerous use cases. Architecture is suggested aiming to fulfill all the subscriber demands in an optimal manner. The Appendix mentions some ongoing standardization activities and research projects of D2D communication.