Two-hop communication scheme for FlashLinQ device-to-device communication system

A new technology for D2D communication, called FlashLinQ (FLQ), is introduced by Qualcomm in order to enable effective D2D communications in OFDM based wireless networks. Through introducing a SIR-based link scheduling method, FLQ can more efficiently utilize the shared wireless medium than the existing technologies. In addition, newly designed single-tone analog signal in FLQ enables D2D devices to discover each other, establish D2D links, and coordinate medium access in much wider area compare with the existing technologies. Nevertheless, the signaling based on the single-tone signal cannot guarantee the minimum performance of the data transfer through multi-tone signals. In order to overcome the limitation, we propose a new two-hop communication scheme (THCS) that enables MAC-level multi-hop communications with minor overheads in FLQ. Through naturally evolving the existing link scheduling in FLQ, the proposed two-hop communication scheme enhances service coverage of D2D communications and improves the utilization of the newly designed single-tone signals. From simulations, it is shown that the proposed scheme promotes not only the overall throughput but also the reuse of the shared medium of FLQ networks.