SERS: Social-Aware Energy-Efficient Relay Selection in D2D Communications

The explosion of mobile applications and phenomenal adoption of mobile connectivity by end users have generated increasing amounts of mobile data traffic. Recognizing the need of increasing network capacity, cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communications and efficient power allocation have been proposed to address the imperative problem. Existing works mainly focus on relay selection and power control at physical layer. The social connections between mobile users, however, are omitted in consideration of improving the cooperative D2D communication quality. Leveraging social trust, we propose an innovative social-aware energy-efficient relay selection (SERS) mechanism that considers the hidden social ties among mobile users to ensure that more users are willing to participate in the cooperative communications. The proposed SERS takes both social and physical constraints into account to determine the best choice of relay devices. In SERS, we further develop an optimization problem based on game theory, aiming at reducing energy consumption and interference. In the game, social distance is treated as a penalty coefficient and performs distributed control of the transmission power for D2D communications. Simulations based on real-world social network data traces show that SERS achieves a significant performance gain, compared with other relay selection approaches.