Social-Community-Aware Long-Range Link Establishment for Multihop D2D Communication Networks

With the ever-increasing demands for local area services of popular content sharing, device-to-device (D2D) communication is conceived to be a key component of the next-generation cellular networks. D2D communications consume low energy and provide high capacity via proximity range transmissions, where multihop transmissions are needed for real-time content sharing. Aiming to solve the challenging problem for multihop D2D communication networks, existing studies only consider communication domain information to create long-range links (LLs) to reduce multihop transmission delay. In contrast, in this paper, we propose a novel social-community-aware LLs establishment strategy, which exploits the interplay between social network features and communication domain constraints. We first formulate the LLs establishment strategy as a cost-minimization problem and then propose an efficient greedy algorithm to solve the formulated problem, which is suitable for scenarios of both single-sink and distributed content sharing. To decrease the computational complexity, we model the optimization problem as a coalition graph game and propose a dynamic algorithm based on local best response and a near-optimal algorithm based on switching operation, which both run in the distributed approach. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed solution decreases the average path length significantly with low computational complexity compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.