Minimal Impact on the Performance of Device-To-Device Communication in 5G

Traditional cellular network, devices are not permitted to directly communicate with each other in the approved cellular bandwidth and all communications take place via the base stations. In this article, we foresee a two-tier cellular network that includes a macrocell tier (i.e., BS-to-system communications) and a system tier (i.e., node-to-device communications A).System terminal relaying makes it possible for devices in a network to act as transmission relays for each other and realize a huge ad hoc mesh network. It is clearly a radical break from the traditional cellular architecture and presents particular technological challenges. In such a two-tier cellular system, since the user data is routed through other users’ devices, security must be maintained for privacy. To ensure minimal impact on the performance of existing macrocell BSs, the two-tier network needs to be designed with smart interference management strategies and appropriate resource allocation schemes. Furthermore, novel pricing models should be designed to tempt devices to participate in this type of communication. Our article provides an overview of these major challenges in two-tier networks and proposes some pricing schemes for different types of device relaying.