Development of a system-level simulator for evaluating performance of device-to-device communication underlaying LTE-advanced networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication enables mobile devices to directly communicate with each other without help of infrastructure and to reuse radio resources of cellular networks. In case that cellular and D2D user equipments (UEs) reuse the radio resources, interference between them may degrade their performance. Therefore, interference between cellular and D2D UEs should be analyzed and coordinated to avoid performance degradation of the networks. In this paper, we develop a system-level simulator for evaluating performance of D2D communication underlaying cellular networks. The simulator consists of five functional modules and operates with event-driven simulation paradigm. We adopt a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate controlling the simulator and observing the results in execution of simulation. Utilizing the simulator, we analyze interference between cellular and D2D UEs for two cases of interference scenarios. From the results, we can notice that D2D communication reusing uplink resources achieves better performance than that reusing downlink ones.