A device discovery scheme for proximity services in LTE networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are currently attracting high interest from industry and academia, targeting at new commercial and public safety proximity services (ProSe). A major challenge under consideration is the device discovery problem, i.e., the problem of meeting the communication peers in time, frequency and space. In line with the current standardization efforts from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), we propose a centrally controlled device discovery scheme which consists of an application layer procedure and a set of access level enhancements. The target of the application layer procedure is to enable the ProSe discovery services, while the access level enhancements ensure the spectrum resources required for discovery transmissions. Evaluation results illustrate the impact of consuming cellular resources for device discovery on cellular network performance, while reveal the potential performance gains for the cellular network due to the introduction of the ProSe communications.