Cooperative Device-to-Device Communications: Social Networking Perspectives

Abstract

With an increasing demand to improve spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency in cellular networks, device-to-device (D2D) communications have drawn a lot of attention from both academia and industry. Cooperative D2D networking, which allows for cooperation among mobile users (MUs) via D2D links while communicating with other MUs or base stations (BSs), is one of the most promising techniques in D2D communications. In cooperative D2D communications, two major issues need to be investigated: network performance evaluation and peer selection. In order to enhance evaluation accuracy while maintaining data privacy, it is essential to employ social interactions among MUs in cooperative D2D communications. In this article, we investigate social aware cooperative D2D networks. We first introduce social relationship formation, and then social learning based cooperative network evaluation and social relationship based peer selection are investigated, respectively. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.