Social-aware relay selection and energy-efficient resource allocation for relay-aided D2D communication

How to improve the flexibility of limited communication resources to meet the increasing requirements of data services has become one of the research hotspots of the modern wireless communication network. In this paper, a novel social-aware motivated relay selection method is put forward to allocate the energy efficiency (EE) resources for the device-to-device (D2D) communication. To improve system flexibility, a D2D user is selected to act as a relay named D2D-relay instead of the traditional cellular relay. The optimal relay selection strategy is formulated by searching the maximum trust value that is obtained by assessing the link stability and social connections between two users. Then, the resource allocation problem, which turns out to be a mixed-integer nonlinear fractional programming (MINLFP) problem, is solved by maximizing the total EE under physical constraint and social constraint synthetically. To improve the solution efficiency, a novel iterative algorithm is proposed by integrating the Dinkelbach theory and Lagrange dual decomposition method. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Compared with the existing social-blind and social-aware schemes, it significantly improves the probability of successful relay selection and total EE of the D2D pairs. (C) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.