Energy efficient device discovery for social cloud applications in 3GPP LTE-advanced networks

Recent advances in 3GPP for device-to-device (D2D) communications underlying the cellular infrastructure have revealed several benefits regarding network resource management and increased coverage. Notwithstanding these advantages, peer discovery may significant amount of device battery if devices need to constantly sense and notify each other irrespective of the application subscriptions, and the potential of establishing D2D communications. In this paper, we consider a novel social application-based discovery mechanism that enables D2D UEs to achieve significant energy consumption savings, using the concept of social cloud region. Such a cloud-based region helps UE to activate D2D discovery features only when they are close enough to other, while having same application-based interests. The engagement of cloud applications provides the means of offloading the discovery process from not only UEs but also the LTE core network. In this paper we analyze the energy consumption profiles of various discovery mechanisms using simulations. Our simulation results validate that our proposed discovery mechanism results in significant energy savings by reducing the frequency of performing discovery procedures.