Design and Implementation of LTE Advanced Underlay Device to Device Communication Framework

Abstract

Device to Device (D2D) communication is one of the key enhancement of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced standard which is a precursor to fifth generation (5G) cellular standard. D2D has gained considerable attention due to several drawbacks associated with the existing mobile networks such as multi-hop transmission, higher latency, high power consumption and significant path loss. In an underlay D2D communication, both cellular and D2D users coexist by simultaneously sharing the licensed cellular spectrum. However, the performance of an underlay D2D communication is limited by the amount of interference from the cellular user(CU) to the D2D user and vice versa. In this paper, we design and develop a test-bed to evaluate the real-world performance of the underlay D2D communication framework. We demonstrate the impact of interference caused by CU on D2D receiver's throughput at different cellular angles and position with respect to the base station (BS). The demonstration has been performed on National Instruments Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) RIO platform with LTE application framework module of LabVIEW communication system design suite as a supportive Application programming interface (API).