GROUPS-NET: Group Meetings Aware Routing in Multi-Hop D2D Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces GROUPS-NET, a social group-aware routing protocol for multi-hop D2D networks that achieves high delivery ratios with significantly reduced network overhead without requiring complex social structure detection.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, parameter-free routing algorithm that leverages group meeting properties without needing community detection, improving efficiency in D2D networks.

Findings

Achieves similar delivery ratios to state-of-the-art methods

Reduces network overhead by up to 40%

Validated on multiple real-world datasets

Abstract

In the next generation cellular networks, device-to-device (D2D) communication is already considered a fundamental feature. A problem of multi-hop D2D networks is on how to define forwarding algorithms that achieve, at the same time, high delivery ratio and low network overhead. In this paper we aim to understand group meetings' properties by looking at their structure and regularity with the final goal of applying such knowledge in the design of a forwarding algorithm for D2D multi-hop networks. We introduce a forwarding protocol, namely GROUPS-NET, which is aware of social group meetings and their evolution over time. Our algorithm is parameter-calibration free and does not require any knowledge about the social network structure of the system. In particular, different from the state of the art algorithms, GROUPS-NET does not need communities detection, which is a complex and expensive task. We validate our algorithm using different publicly available data-sources. In real large scale scenarios, our algorithm achieves approximately the same delivery ratio of the state-of-art solution with up to 40% less network overhead.