Device-to-device (D2D) communication, an emerging form of wireless communication, has attracted considerable attention, but an efficient synchronization protocol has not yet been developed. This has crucial implications for public safety applications that lack sufficient network infrastructure. In the public safety applications, the cellular network may not be available or fully functional when the base stations are malfunctioned or destroyed due to disasters, such as an earthquake, a tsunami, or an attack. One of the major features of D2D is to provide a self-organized communication network for emergency use. In this paper, we develop a synchronization protocol to assist mobile devices in a target area in establishing a synchronized network for public safety applications. The signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio-based synchronization protocol proposed accounts for the dynamic physical layer reception effect, and its algorithm can efficiently designate D2D devices to assist in forwarding timing signals, thereby enhancing the coverage of the synchronous network. More importantly, our synchronization protocol and its algorithm may assist D2D devices in dynamically changing their state to adapt to the variant wireless channel conditions and dynamic topology of the network. In the simulation results, we show that the proposed synchronization protocol enabled more than 90% of the D2D devices to successfully synchronize with the network, whereas only 75% of D2D devices successfully synchronized with the network through the legacy synchronization protocol.
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