5G Millimeter-Wave and D2D Symbiosis: 60 GHz for Proximity-based Services

Abstract

The characteristics of two key communication technologies in 5G: Device-to-Device (D2D) and millimeter-wave (mmWave), are complementary. While D2D facilitates the communication of nearby mobile nodes, mmWave provides very high throughput short-range links by using carrier frequencies beyond 30 GHz, and reduces interference by using directional communication. This directly addresses two critical issues in cellular networks, namely, the increasing number of users and the high throughput requirements. In this paper, we explore the above symbiosis of D2D and mmWave. More precisely, we integrate mmWave communications into the 3GPP framework for D2D communication, i.e., Proximity-based Services. To this end, we design the message exchange among entities in the ProSe Architecture to support the discovery, establishment and maintenance of mmWave links. Further, we evaluate the performance of a mmWave D2D system for the case of a picocell operating in the 60 GHz band. We experimentally analyze the benefits of combining D2D and 60 GHz communication. Our results show that this combination improves performance in terms of throughput by up to 2.3 times.