Bio-Inspired Proximity Discovery and Synchronization for D2D Communications

In this paper, a distributed mechanism for application-aware proximity services (ProSe) in device to device (D2D) communications is presented. The method, which is derived from the bio-inspired firefly algorithm, can achieve proximity discovery and synchronization at one time. To be precise, this mechanism not only enables neighbour discovery and service discovery simultaneously, but achieves synchronization in physical communication timing and service interests in the meanwhile. However, the basic firefly algorithm is not perfectly suitable for larger scale systems such as LTE-A D2D. In most network topologies, the property that each node may not be able to hear all its neighbours makes the basic version fail. Thus, we further propose the firefly spanning tree (FST) algorithm which can solve the topology-dependent divergence problems.