On social-aware data uploading study of D2D-enabled cellular networks

Abstract The data uploading study of device-to-device (D2D) enabled cellular networks is critical for supporting their applications. Available data uploading studies for D2D-enabled cellular networks mainly consider either the cooperative scenarios with full trust or no trust, where the devices in the network forward data with each other in full cooperative or noncooperative way, while largely neglecting the effect of human social relationships on the cooperation behaviors among the devices under real scenarios. As a first step to address this issue, this paper extends the previous works on cooperative D2D data uploading for cellular networks to a more real social network scenario and investigates social-aware data uploading in D2D-enable cellular networks. We first propose an incentive mechanism to compensate the resource consumption (e.g., energy, memory, and time spent) of devices on data uploading. With this incentive mechanism, the nearby devices can obtain rewards such that they are willing to construct a multi-hop D2D chain to assist the other devices for data uploading. To this end, we adopt coalitional game to formulate the D2D chain with careful consideration of social-aware data uploading, where each device acts as a player and the individual reward is modeled as the utility function. We further design a coalition formation algorithm with merge-and-split rules to determine the solution for formulated D2D chain. Extensive simulations are conducted to illustrate the performance improvement of our proposed scheme in comparison with that of other state-of-the-art schemes.