Socially aware D2D cooperative communications for enhancing Internet of Things application

Abstract

To satisfy the rapidly growing requirements of wireless data services recently, fog computing which is as an extension of cloud computing is proposed for offloading the Internet of Things (IoT) data services and applications. It depends more on the collaboration of near-located devices, instead of sending the information to remote servers. In this paper, we conceive the idea of utilizing device-to-device (D2D) communications as the infrastructures for computation and communication. In particular, D2D communication technology is one of the most important and innovative revolutions in the development of future cellular networks, which greatly enlarges the system capacity and extensively enriches the service category and application diversity. In computation part, by analyzing the interest difference of users, a Virtual Fog Community (VFC) is established in this paper, which exploits the coalition game based on the transfer effectiveness to adaptively divide users into multiple fog communities. In communication part, by perceiving the importance degrees of users and accordingly employing multidimensional network status parameters such as the local centrality and closeness degree, the best cooperative user can be reasonably selected based on the physical and social attributes of users. Therefore, the corresponding inter-community and intra-community D2D cooperative transmission mechanisms are devised to dramatically optimize the network resource utilization. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism fully exploits the social relationship between users and effectively enhances the network operational efficiency at the cost of relatively low delay.