Random access protocol 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) communications in a cellular network. Recently, numerous resource allocation schemes have been proposed to tackle the problem of excessive interference caused by D2D links (i.e., a direct communication link between devices). However, most of the existing resource allocation schemes are centralized, which incurs substantial communication and computational overhead. To overcome the difficulty, this paper proposes a fully-distributed D2D communication protocol for collision avoidance. To protect a D2D receiver, the proposed protocol creates an exclusion region around the D2D receiver, where interferers are prohibited from transmitting a signal. We analyze the proposed protocol 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 protocol outperforms a slotted ALOHA scheme by a very wide margin.