Device-to-device (D2D) communication is a promising concept to improve user experiences and resource utilization in cellular networks, which enables two or more mobile devices in proximity to establish local links, coordinated by a base station, to perform direct data exchange. The benefits of D2D communication include ubiquitous computing and communication, traffic offloading, energy efficiency enhancement, coverage extension, creation of new services, and so on.

However, many research challenges still exist, such as to analyze the performance of these systems in different channel conditions, to compare their performance with existing technologies, to study the performance with different transmission and resource management techniques, to apply such techniques into cooperative communications, and to model hardware and propagation effects. The aim of this special issue is to address research advances that enable D2D communication in cellular networks and report on the state-of-the-art contributions in this area. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Channel and interference modeling
• Antenna design and propagation effects
• Performance analysis and theoretical limits
• Channel and source coding techniques
• Efficient signal processing algorithms
• MIMO techniques
• Cooperative communication
• Network design: resource managements, scheduling, and cross-layer design
• Practical implementation and experimental measurements
• New services and applications

Before submission authors should carefully read the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ijap/d2d/ according to the following timetable: