A novel device-to-device communication protocol for public safety applications

The UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest and most advanced cellular technology that is coming to market. As LTE and its advanced version promise unprecedented peak data rates both in uplink and downlink, they seem to represent a striking solution for many fields requiring mobile broadband access. Nowadays, one area that is strongly emerging is represented by public safety communications. In this field, users not only need to communicate in traditional cellular fashion but they also need to communicate directly in case the network infrastructure is temporary unavailable or if the operating conditions prevent reliable links. In the the literature this is referred to as device-to-device (D2D) communication mode. This paper investigates D2D communications where beacon-enabled and simple LTE terminals are scattered over the area of a major event according to two homogeneous Poisson Point Processes. The contribution of this paper is twofold: we first devise an innovative D2D protocol and then we investigate the probability of LTE mobile terminals to form in D2D networks using a stochastic geometry approach.