Performance Analysis of Network Assisted Neighbor Discovery Algorithms

Recently there has been an increasing interest in applications that enable users in the proximity of one another to share experiences, discover surrounding events, play online games and in general develop proximity based social networks. Most of the existing applications are based on cellular network communications, combined with over-the-top (OTT) solutions involving either registration at an application server and/or obtaining location information from a positioning system such as Global Positioning System (GPS). However, registration at a server often requires continuous registration updates due to, for example, mobility and changes in user population, which is a tedious and resource consuming process. In addition, using GPS drains the battery of devices. Since the spectrum used for cellular network is limited, it can become a scarce resource with increasing quantity of the devices. In order to deal with these problems, the concept of direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has been proposed as a solution. Using D2D technology, devices can discover nearby devices without extra positioning information. It can not only increase the spectrum efficiency, but also improve the coverage of cellular network. The discovery of devices can be prepared before the actual communication phase or proceed simultaneously. In this work, we mainly investigate the former one, which is called a-priori discovery. In fact, a-priory device discovery provides a value on its own right, independently of a subsequent communication phase using D2D or traditional cellular communication. Previous studies indicate that ad hoc D2D discovery (i.e. without cellular network assistance) is feasible but time, resource and energy consuming. Recognizing this problem, both academia and industry pay more attention to the D2D discovery in cellular spectrum, where D2D discovery can be assisted by a cellular radio access network. Despite this interest, to the best of our knowledge, there is essentially no work on identifying different degrees of network assistance (that we call the " network assistance levels ") and evaluating the potential gains of specific network assistance algorithms. Therefore, in this thesis work we develop algorithms that take advantage of network assistance to improve the performance of the ad hoc neighbor discovery algorithms in terms of energy efficiency, resource utilization, discovery time and discovery rate. To address the requirements of different applications and types of devices, two design objectives are studied in this work. The first one is discovery time prioritized without energy limitation, while the other is constrained to using a certain amount of energy. We …