Location-Based Decision-Making Mechanism for Device-to-Device Link Establishment

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has a high potential in reducing the amount of network traffic and improving the latency and energy efficiency of communication. Currently, D2D link establishment decisions are based on active probing between devices that wish to establish a D2D link. The main drawback of such approaches is a large overhead as during active probing no data communication can take place. We leverage physical locations of the devices that wish to establish a D2D link in order to estimate the probability of success in establishing the link before making an attempt to communicate. The probability of success is given as a closed form equation that takes into account the imperfections of location information of the devices and intrinsic randomness of wireless environments. We experimentally evaluate the proposed location-based decision- making mechanism for D2D link establishment in a complex office-like indoor environment. We show that setting the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) threshold of the proposed mechanism to a value that is 5 dB higher than the nominal SNR required for communication results in reliable link establishment with false positive rate of less than 2%. Furthermore, we show a relatively small loss of link establishment potential due to an increase in the inaccuracies of location information.