Neighbor and Service Discovery Protocols with Security Enhancement for Device-to-Device Communication in LTE{LTE-A Cellular Networks

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has become one of the most popular topic in the 5th generation (5G) mobile communication technology. D2D offers opportunities for access to services through direct neighbor device connection with or/and without base station (BS) assistance. Some of the possible improvements using D2D communication include high data rate, network offloading and range extension, as well as commercial and social proximity services networking. Although a lot of studies exist in the research community, D2D communication with one of the end users are located outside the cellular network coverage has not received enough attention. Some of the problems faced in this case are discovering process of neighbor user equipment (UE) and services, as well as designing suitable and secure protocols for D2D communication. Toward these problems, two protocols (reactive and proactive) for neighbor and service discovery are proposed in this thesis. Implementation of reactive protocol, proactive protocol, simulation and validation are shown. Furthermore, the proposed protocols are improved with additional security enhancement. The overhead calculation results show that reactive protocol achieves better performance when data traffic load is lower whereas proactive is preferred with higher traffic load in D2D communication.