Design of a D2D Overlay for Next Generation LTE

With the ever-growing popularity of smartphones, new services are emerging where the local and positioning as- pects becomes more important. Additionally, new types of traffic, such as vehicle-to-vehicle communications are being developed. In order to address these new trends, release-12 of LTE has started to evaluate, and possibly standardize, solutions for de- vice-to-device (D2D) communication. This provides the founda- tions for the deployment of a D2D overlay. However, this should be viewed as a first step, and future LTE releases should encom- pass more advanced D2D communication techniques and archi- tectures. In this paper, after reviewing the standardization progress for LTE in release-12, several possible improvements are examined for future releases both D2D discovery and com- munication. It is shown that the future D2D architecture should exploit the network when possible in order to provide an im- proved user experience and satisfy the need for more local ser- vices.