Device-to-Device Networking Meets Cellular via Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces NCMI, a network coding framework for cooperative mobile devices using cellular and D2D links, improving data transmission efficiency in proximity-based networks.

Contribution

It develops a novel network coding framework for joint cellular and D2D networks and analyzes its performance with packet completion time as a metric.

Findings

NCMI reduces transmission slots needed for complete data recovery.

Simulation results show improved efficiency over traditional methods.

Framework effectively exploits D2D opportunities for cooperative networking.

Abstract

Utilizing device-to-device (D2D) connections among mobile devices is promising to meet the increasing throughput demand over cellular links. In particular, when mobile devices are in close proximity of each other and are interested in the same content, D2D connections such as Wi-Fi Direct can be opportunistically used to construct a cooperative (and jointly operating) cellular and D2D networking system. However, it is crucial to understand, quantify, and exploit the potential of network coding for cooperating mobile devices in the joint cellular and D2D setup. In this paper, we consider this problem, and (i) develop a network coding framework, namely NCMI, for cooperative mobile devices in the joint cellular and D2D setup, where cellular and D2D link capacities are the same, and (ii) characterize the performance of the proposed network coding framework, where we use packet completion time, which is the number of transmission slots to recover all packets, as a performance metric. We demonstrate the benefits of our network coding framework through simulations.