Hybrid STBC–SM Suitable for Multi-link Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication in cellular networks is considered as an emerging technology in future mobile communication systems (e.g. LTE release 12 and beyond). However, most conventional D2D studies have emphasized one-to-one communications, in which only two D2D users directly communicate with each other. This is because these studies were focused on reducing interference between D2D users and base stations or cellular users via power allocation, interference cancellation, and so on. In this paper, however, we focus on multi-link D2D communication in cellular networks, in which more than two D2D users can exchange their information symbols simultaneously, such as a mesh network. Multi-link D2D communication requires a suitable transmission scheme for its efficiency and reliability; thus, we employ hybrid space-time block coding and spatial multiplexing (hybrid STBC–SM). This not only improves reliability, but also increases network data rates. Compared with other transmission schemes (e.g. STBC and SM), the proposed multi-link D2D communication method using hybrid STBC–SM provides improved performance in terms of bit error rate, frame error rate, symbol rates, and effective throughput.