Device-to-device communication for capacity enhancement in cellular networks

In wireless cellular networks, multiple scenarios involve the communication between devices located in the same vicinity. These links can be offloaded to a device to device (D2D) underlay which is controlled by the cellular infrastructure. Such an option alleviates the load on the base stations and saves spectrum resources for downlink connections. In this paper, we investigate the impact of D2D communications on the capacity of a cellular network from two directions: average link capacity and coverage. We present a stochastic geometry based framework which captures both cellular and device to device links. Based on this framework, we quantify the enhancements offered by D2D underlay in terms of system coverage, average link capacity and spectrum usage.