Leveraging Social Communities for Optimizing Cellular Device-to-Device Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a social community-based framework for multi-hop device-to-device communications that enhances network capacity and reduces costs by leveraging social encounter data to maintain connectivity despite device mobility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel social community-aware approach for D2D communication that outperforms traditional methods by optimizing content transmission and incentivizing user participation.

Findings

Significant traffic offloading from cellular to D2D networks.

Improved success rate of D2D connections in mobile environments.

Cost reduction for base stations through social community insights.

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) communications over licensed wireless spectrum has been recently proposed as a promising technology to meet the capacity crunch of next generation cellular networks. However, due to the high mobility of cellular devices, establishing and ensuring the success of D2D transmission becomes a major challenge. To this end, in this paper, a novel framework is proposed to enable devices to form multi-hop D2D connections in an effort to maintain sustainable communication in the presence of device mobility. To solve the problem posed by device mobility, in contrast to existing works, which mostly focus on physical domain information, a durable community based approach is introduced taking social encounters into context. It is shown that the proposed scheme can derive an optimal solution for time sensitive content transmission while also minimizing the cost that the base station pays in order to incentivize users to participate in D2D. Simulation results show that the proposed social community aware approach yields significant performance gain, in terms of the amount of traffic offloaded from the cellular network to the D2D tier, compared to the classical social-unaware methods.