Improving D2D communications using 3D beamforming in 5G wireless networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication and beamforming technology are identified as promising innovations in the next generation wireless ecosystem. D2D technology allows direct communication between devices, which will be a key technology to meet the 5G's requirements in terms of delay and throughput. In this regard, resource allocation and interference management are two major challenges. In this paper we present a centralized architecture to manage discovery phase for D2D communications in 5G. Furthermore, we propose the three dimensional (3D) beamforming technique as a way to manage interferences when D2D communication is used. Numerical evaluation shows improvement in terms of outage probability, reachable throughput and energy consumption.