Distributed Random Access Scheme for Collision Avoidance in Cellular Device-to-Device Communication

In this paper, we propose a fully-distributed random access protocol for the device-to-device (D2D) communication in a cellular network. The D2D communication can provide a significant capacity gain by enabling a cellular network to offload data traffic to direct communication links between devices (i.e., D2D link). However, a D2D link can generate serious interference to other D2D links as well as cellular devices without any proper interference control mechanism. Compared to centralized resource allocation and power control schemes for the D2D communication, a distributed scheme is advantageous in that it has smaller control overhead and is more responsive to traffic demands. To protect a D2D receiver, the proposed scheme employs a collision avoidance mechanism that creates an exclusion region around the D2D receiver, where interferers are prohibited from transmitting a signal. We analyze the proposed scheme by assuming that the locations of devices follow a Poisson point process. By simulation, we show that the analysis results accurately match the simulation results and that the proposed scheme outperforms a distributed D2D scheme without collision avoidance by a very wide margin.