Social-aware energy harvesting device-to-device communications in 5G networks

With ever increasing demands for local area services in 5G cellular networks, solutions are necessary to deliver local area data in a spectrum- and energy-efficient manner. In this article we propose a new cellular communication architecture that integrates energy harvesting technologies and social networking characteristics into D2D communications for local data dissemination. The proposed architecture includes three domains: the physical domain, the energy domain, and the social domain. Specifically, in the physical domain, D2D communications enable two nearby users to communicate with each other directly. In the energy domain, devices harvest energy from renewable energy sources. In the social domain, D2D users form social networks exhibiting stable social structures and relations. Then we mainly focus on the efficient local data dissemination issues in the proposed architecture and propose two social-aware energy harvesting D2D communication schemes (device relay and device multicast). Illustrative results demonstrate significant spectrum and energy efficiency enhancement for local data dissemination in 5G cellular networks.