Coexistence Analysis of D2D-Unlicensed and Wi-Fi Communications

Abstract

By enabling direct communications between nearby user equipment (UE), device-to-device (D2D) communication has become one of the key technologies in 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. D2D communication brings new communication opportunities for mobile devices, especially in a highly dense network. In this paper, D2D communication in the unlicensed spectrum, namely, D2D-Unlicensed (D2D-U), is discussed. The use of unlicensed frequency bands can ease the shortage of spectrum resources and improve network performance. However, the D2D-U in 5G has significant effects on the network performance of existing unlicensed networks sharing the same frequency bands, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Therefore, it is necessary to design a fair coexistence scheme for D2D-U. To understand the coexistence problem, in this paper, we first formulate the network performance of D2D-U and Wi-Fi under two different coexistence schemes, namely, listen before talk (LBT) and duty cycle mechanism (DCM). Then, we use computer simulations to investigate a mode selection scheme that switches between these two schemes and point out the best possible solution for the coexistence between D2D-U and Wi-Fi.