Experimental Evaluation of LTE Throughput Using D2D Multi-Hop Communications

The access part of all cellular networks generation suffers from common issues related to dead spots (parts that are not covered by the network) and hot spots (parts where the active cellular clients exceed the network resources). During the last eighteen years, lots of research proposals have tried to overcome cellular problems through MCN (Multi-hop Cellular Networks) architectures or what is newly called D2D multi-hop communications which is a new paradigm allowing the extension of cellular access part via ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we identify the key D2D architecture classification factors, we present some proposed D2D architectures, and then we build our experimental platform in real indoor environment, with android smartphones to compare uplin/downlink throughputs and latency between single hop and multi-hop communication trough D2D architecture inside a 4G cellular network.