OFDMA-Based Device-to-Device Communication Frameworks: Testbed Deployment and Measurement Results

Device-to-device (D2D) communication exploits the proximity between two devices to enhance the overall spectrum utilization of a crowded cellular network. Two conventional frameworks that are generally used to realize a D2D communication are underlay D2D (U-D2D) and cooperative D2D (C-D2D) communications. Both frameworks have their own merits and demerits in terms of interference management, implementation complexity, and achievable spectral efficiency (SE). For instance, the performance of U-D2D is limited by the amount of interference from the D2D to the cellular user (CU), whereas for C-D2D the performance suffers due to a division of transmission into two orthogonal time phases. In this paper, we propose two novel extensions of conventional D2D communication frameworks, which alleviate their drawbacks and also improves the performance of the overall cellular network. The first proposed framework is an adaptive interference aware U-D2D communication framework. Through this framework, the CU can be protected from the excessive interference of the D2D transmitter (DT), thus maintaining the desired quality of service at CU. The second proposed framework is an adaptive C-D2D communication framework. This framework employs adaptive modulation and coding and bit error rate-based selection and combining to enhance the performance of cellular and D2D users. As a proof-of-concept demonstration and performance assessment, both the frameworks have been implemented on a National Instruments Universal Software Radio Peripheral platform. The measurement results and on-field trials show that the proposed frameworks improve the bit error rate (BER) and the SE of the overall system. Results also interpret that the adaptive C-D2D outperforms the adaptive interference aware U-D2D in terms of BER and SE.