System performance of cellular network underlaying D2D multi-hop communication

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication was initially proposed in cellular networks as a new paradigm to enhance network performance. The main focus is on the capacity of the proposed system with multiple idle UEs serving as relays. This paper investigates the tight integration of D2D communication into an LTE-A network and the performance of D2D multi-hop communication. Further, we present numerical results based on the system simulations in an interference limited scenario. Our studies and analysis and numerical results indicate that multi-hop D2D communications combined schemes can be useful not only for harvesting the potential gains previously identified in the literature, but also for extending the coverage of cellular networks.