Social Network-Based Content Delivery in Device-to-Device Underlay Cellular Networks Using Matching Theory

With the popularity of social network-based services, the unprecedented growth of mobile date traffic has brought a heavy burden on the traditional cellular networks. Device-to-device (D2D) communication, as a promising solution to overcome wireless spectrum crisis, can enable fast content delivery based on user activities in social networks. In this paper, we address the content delivery problem related to optimization of peer discovery and resource allocation by combining both the social and physical layer information in D2D underlay networks. The social relationship, which is modeled as the probability of selecting similar contents and estimated by using the Bayesian nonparametric models, is used as a weight to characterize the impact of social features on D2D pair formation and content sharing. Next, we propose a 3-D iterative matching algorithm to maximize the sum rate of D2D pairs weighted by the intensity of social relationships while guaranteeing the quality of service requirements of both cellular and D2D links simultaneously. Moreover, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges to a stable matching and is weak Pareto optimal, and also provide the theoretical complexity. Simulation results show that the algorithm is able to achieve more than 90% of the optimum performance with a computation complexity 1000 times lower than the exhaustive matching algorithm. It is also demonstrated that the satisfaction performance of D2D receivers can be increased significantly by incorporating social relationships into the resource allocation design.