Routing in Multi-Hop Cellular Device-to-Device (D2D) Networks: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, device-to-device (D2D) communication has attained significant attention in the research community. The advantages of D2D communication can be fully realized in multi-hop communication scenario. The integration of cellular and multi-hop networks not only provides guaranteed quality of service and reliability as a traditional cellular network, but also has the flexibility and adaptability as a multi-hop network. Routing in such multi-hop cellular D2D networks is a critical issue, since the multi-hop network can perform worse than a traditional cellular network if wrong routing decisions are made. This is because routing in these multi-hop networks needs to take care of the node mobility, dynamic network topology, and network fragmentation, which did not exist in traditional cellular networking. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of routing in multi-hop D2D networks. Some future research directions for the routing in D2D networks are also discussed at the end of this paper.