  Device-to-Device communications are expected to play an important role in
current and future cellular generations, by increasing the spatial reuse of
spectrum resources and enabling lower latency communication links. This
paradigm has two fundamental building blocks: (i) proximity discovery and (ii)
direct communication between proximate devices. While (ii) is treated
extensively in the recent literature, (i) has received relatively little
attention. In this paper we analyze a network-assisted underlay proximity
discovery protocol, where a cellular device can take the role of: announcer
(which announces its interest in establishing a D2D connection) or monitor
(which listens for the transmissions from the announcers). Traditionally, the
announcers transmit their messages over dedicated channel resources. In
contrast, inspired by recent advances on receivers with multiuser decoding
capabilities, we consider the case where the announcers underlay their messages
in the downlink transmissions that are directed towards the monitoring devices.
We propose a power control scheme applied to the downlink transmission, which
copes with the underlay transmission via additional power expenditure, while
guaranteeing both reliable downlink transmissions and underlay proximity
discovery.
