Cooperative Device-to-Device Communication With Network Coding for Machine Type Communication Devices

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, it is pressing to improve wireless transmission efficiency, especially for machine type communications, due to the limited wireless spectrum. In this paper, we propose a downlink transmission scheme leveraging cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communications and network coding, which can largely reduce the cellular resource consumption and the total energy consumption. In the proposed scheme, the base station generates and broadcasts linear combinations based on the packets requested by different user equipments (UEs) until at least one mature UE can recover all the original packets. Then, a selected mature UE broadcasts new linear combinations based on the recovered original packets to neighbors via D2D until all UEs can decode their packets. A feasible and backward-compatible system design including the necessary revisions on the protocol stack based on the current cellular system architecture is also provided. Then, the closed-form probability mass functions of transmission times for both cellular and D2D transmissions are derived, where the error rates in both cellular and D2D transmissions have been considered. The feedback load is also analyzed. Simulation results with different block error rate (BLER) settings are given, which can be used as references for the cellular network to decide the target BLER and adapt the modulation and coding.