Performance Analysis for Millimeter Wave Device-to-Device Communication Networks: A Review

Abstract

The mobile broadband access is expanding rapidly in the recent times due to advancement in technical specifications of the Fourth Generation (4G) mobile cellular system. The resulting higher traffic demand which continues to increase as more devices are coming up to provide broadband services might not be supported by the current 4G network at the required user experience and quality. These services need a wide range of requirements that can be offered only by the Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks. The millimeter-wave (mmwave) Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has emerged as an enabling technology to offer high capacity network connectivity, traffic offloading and high energy efficiency. The mmwave D2D communication can support bandwidth-intensive applications due the large bandwidth available in the mmwave band. However, at the mmwave frequency range the transmitted signal suffers from high path and blockage losses. Therefore, this calls for solution approaches which can mitigate these losses and increase performance of mmwave D2D communication with reduced complexity in terms of achievable rate, energy consumption, energy efficiency and sum rate. The paper gives an overview of the studies that have been done in the area of mmwave D2D communication in terms of beam forming, caching, cooperative communication, scheduling schemes and their solution approaches. In addition, it discusses the challenges of the proposed solutions and gives open research directions for further study. Keywords: 5G, Beam forming, Caching, D2D, mmWave, Relaying, Scheduling