Multi-frame Transfer for Data Dissemination in LTE Device-to-device Proximity Discovery

It starts to be widely recognized the growing and central relevance of Device-to-Device (D2D) interactions for future 5G networking and applications, also to stimulate opportunistic collaborations and efficient resource usage based on proximity. A crucial building block to enable such D2D collaboration is prox-imity discovery, hopefully with so limited network/energy overhead to have the opportunity to be “always-on”. This paper proposes an original and efficient mul-ti-frame transport protocol for disseminating data of any length over real indus-trial D2D solutions. In particular, even if of general applicability, we have origi-nally implemented our protocol on top of the new LTE Direct proximity discov-ery, which has very strong limitations in the transmittable data for single discov-ery period. The paper not only describes our development experience with the brand new LTE Direct Qualcomm implementation, but also reports experimental results with the LTE Direct simulator included in the Qualcomm LTE Direct Tri-al SDK, which are relevant to tune our protocol and to robustly assess its validity.