Advances in D2D communications: Energy efficient service and device discovery radio

Device-to-Device communications with automated connectivity to sensors, machines and other users is an important enabler for a multitude of use cases with local social networks as one example. In this paper we focus on the main challenges to build a seamless user experience. In particular, we present a novel device beaconing scheme to facilitate service and device discovery. Moreover, the mechanism enables the exchange of small data packets and facilitates the connection setup of a suitable transport radio. We discuss the energy efficiency of the proposed device discovery mechanism and evaluate the capability to form a network in a residential scenario with different device densities.