Social-Aware User Cooperation in Full-Duplex and Half-Duplex Multi-Antenna Systems

Social and communication networks interact with each other in multifaceted ways, yet these interactions are often considered to be secondary in throughput, privacy and security analysis for communication networks. In this paper, full-duplex (FD) and half-duplex (HD) multi-antenna cooperative communication systems are studied by taking both physical links and social connections into account. An optimal beamformer for maximizing communication rate in the proposed sociotechnological setting aims to balance between the direct link and the cooperating link as well as respecting the trust degree between the users. The resulting optimization problems are nontrivial to solve, even numerically, as they are not convex. The complexity of the problems is significantly reduced by showing that a linear combination of the direct and cooperating links' channel vectors maximizes the achievable rate. Then, a computationally efficient numerical solution is used to maximize the rates both in the FD and HD modes. Numerical results demonstrate that significant gains in communication rates can be obtained with the proposed optimal beamforming design.