  In this paper, we present and evaluate the effect of two mode selection
schemes for device to device (D2D) enabled areal netwroks. The two schemes are
based on a threshold received signal strength (RSS) and an average threshold
D2D distance between two given users to select the D2D mode. While one scheme
triggers the D2D mode based on distance values only, the other scheme can
trigger D2D mode for larger distances if a minimum RSS value is received, for
it to maximize connectivity regions. Numerical results show the advantage of
the presented schemes in offloading traffic from aerial platforms and the
effect of the environment on the performance of D2D enabled aerial networks.
