An SDR-based Experimental Study of Outband D2D Communications

Abstract

Device-to-Device communications represent a paradigm shift in cellular networks. Analytical results on D2D performance are very promising, but there is no experimental evidence that validates these results to date. This paper is the first to provide an experimental analysis of outband D2D schemes. Moreover, we design DORE, a complete framework for handling channel opportunities offered by outband D2D relay nodes. DORE consists of resource allocation optimization tools and protocols suitable to integrate QoS-aware opportunistic D2D communications within the architecture of 3GPP Proximity-based Services. We implement DORE using an SDR framework to profile cellular network dynamics in presence of opportunistic outband D2D communication schemes. Our experiments reveal that outband D2D communications are suitable for a large variety of delay-sensitive cellular applications, and that DORE enables notable gains even with a few active D2D relay nodes.