Device-to-Device Communications: A Contemporary Survey

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is a new enabling technology for the next generation cellular networks. In D2D communications, two or more user equipments directly communicate with each other with a very restricted involvement of the evolved Node B. The main objective is to realize high data rates, low power consumption, low delays and improve the overall spectral efficiency. In addition to these advantages, D2D communications poses several research challenges in terms of interference and power control, and whether or not D2D communication should be used in a given environment. In order to solve these issues, significant amount of research and development work has been done by both industry and academia, which is comprehensively covered in this survey article. Firstly, we discuss the use case scenarios of D2D communication by classifying its applications into two types: commercial and public safety services. This is followed by an in-depth discussion on the state-of-the-art solutions proposed in various research studies addressing different issues associated with each classification. While discussing a large number of previous works, we highlight some of the open research issues and challenges in D2D communications.