Social-aware Content Uploading for Cooperative Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract

To support the social-aware content uploading for users (clients) with a poor uplink channel quality in cellular networks, we propose a cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communication scheme. Under this scheme, mobile clients are able to communicate directly and the ones with social relationship form a multi-hop D2D chain, the head of which is in charge of transmitting the desired content to the base station (BS). A promising feature of this scheme is to stimulate effective cooperation among all clients by making use of social-aware relationship. To establish the D2D chain in this scheme, we first employ coalitional game to divide all clients with social relationship into multi-chains, and then propose a coalition formation algorithm to select the optimal chain according to the cost of content uploading such as energy and time. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the efficiency of our proposed scheme in terms of the total content uploading time and energy consumption.