Discovering Mobile Applications in Device-to-Device Communications: Hash Function-Based Approach

In this paper, we propose a code-based discovery protocol for device-to-device (D2D) communications. To realize proximity-based services in D2D communications, such as mobile social networks and mobile marketing, each device should first discover nearby devices, which have mobile applications of interest, by using a discovery protocol. The proposed discovery protocol makes use of a hash function-based discovery code that contains compressed information of mobile applications in a device. When a device receives a discovery code broadcasted by the other device, the device can approximately find out the mobile applications in the other device. The proposed protocol is capable of quickly discovering massive number of devices while consuming a relatively small amount of radio resources. By simulation, we show that the proposed protocol greatly outperforms a simple name-based protocol.