Social-Aware D2D Communications: Qualitative Insights and Quantitative Analysis

With emerging demands for local area services, device-to-device communication is conceived as a vital component for the next-generation cellular networks to improve spectral reuse, bring hop gains, and enhance system capacity. Ripening these benefits depends on efficiently solving several main technical problems, including mode selection, resource allocation, and interference management. Aiming to establish a new paradigm for solving these challenging problems in D2D communication, in this article we propose a social-aware enhanced D2D communication architecture that exploits social networking characteristics for system design. By developing a profound understanding of the interplay between social networks' properties and mobile communication problems, we qualitatively analyze how D2D communications can benefit from social features, and quantitatively assess the achievable gains in a social-aware D2D communication system.