This paper is a first-hand summary on our comprehensive live trial of cellular-assisted device-todevice (D2D) communications currently being ratified by the standards community for next-generation mobile broadband networks. In our test implementation, we employ a full-featured 3GPP LTE network deployment and augment it with all necessary support to provide realtime D2D connectivity over emerging Wi-Fi-Direct (WFD) technology. As a result, our LTE-assisted WFD D2D system enjoys the required flexibility while meeting the existing standards in every feasible detail. Further, this paper provides an account on the extensive measurement campaign conducted with our implementation. The resulting real-world measurements from this campaign quantify the numerical effects of D2D functionality on the resultant system performance. Consequently, they shed light on the general applicability of LTE-assisted WFD solutions and associated operational ranges.Keywords: 3GPP LTE, cellular assistance, commercial opportunities, device-to-device, live trial, performance measurements, standardization, Wi-Fi-Direct. Manuscript received Feb. 10, 2015; revised May 15, 2015; accepted June 4, 2015. The research described in this paper was financed by the National Sustainability Program under grant LO1401. For the research, infrastructure of the SIX Center was used.Alexander Pyattaev (alexander.pyattaev@tut.fi), Mikhail Gerasimenko (mikhail. gerasimenko@tut.fi), Aleksandr Ometov (aleksandr.ometov@tut.fi), Sergey Andreev (sergey. andreev@tut.fi), and Yevgeni Koucheryavy (yk@cs.tut.fi) are with the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Finland.Jiri Hosek (corresponding author, hosek@feec.vutbr.cz), Radko Krkos (krkos@ phd.feec.vutbr.cz), Pavel Masek (xmasek12@phd.feec.vutbr.cz), Jakub Sedy (jakub.sedy@ phd.feec.vutbr.cz), and Vit Novotny (novotnyv@feec.vutbr.cz) are with the Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.Kerstin Johnsson (kerstin.johnsson@intel.com) is with the Wireless Communication Laboratory, Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA.
I. IntroductionDevice-to-device (D2D) communications technology as part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Release 12 specification [1] enables novel unprecedented opportunities for next-generation peer-to-peer (P2P) and location-based applications and services [2]. Most of these new opportunities emerge from discovering and exploiting user proximity, which is provided by virtue of location services in contemporary mobile broadband networks [3]. Together with improvements in network capacity, data delivery latency, individual user throughput, and energy efficiency, D2D also brings along attractive new business cases for network and service providers.With our preliminary research [4]-[5], we have identified numerous benefits that could become available if a coordinated, network-assisted D2D technology is deployed by network operators. On the other hand, introducing D2D te...