Resource allocation for network-assisted device-to-device discovery

We study the resource allocation schemes for device-to-device discovery, which is a key enabler for a wide range of mobile proximity services and safety related applications. The design goals are long-range, high energy efficiency, and resource-efficiency. In particular, we study the performance of device-centric and network-centric resource allocation schemes with different levels of network assistance in single and multi-cell environments by means of system level simulations. We also propose a novel location-based resource allocation scheme that achieves the best performance among all the evaluated schemes. The gain by the location-based scheme is large in single-cell environments, but it is rather limited in multi-cell environments where a simple uniform-random device-centric scheme is shown to perform well requiring only limited network assistance.