Dynamic Network Formation Game With Social Awareness in D2D Communications

The benefit of having a complementary network such as device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular systems lies in alleviating the traffic overloading burdens at base stations (BSs). This is critical in modern-day scenarios, e.g., in offloading and caching of mobile data traffic, and delivery of popular Internet contents to users. In this paper, we are chiefly interested in the establishment of D2D networks and how such a network evolves dynamically over time as D2D links are continuously formed and broken. Another important yet challenging research opportunity, i.e., the leverage of human users' social ties for D2D communications, will also be addressed in this paper. To investigate the D2D network formation problem, we look at a game-theoretic framework where the utility function is designed to balance the physical and social domains-where we systematically extract social tie strengths from a real-world data set. To study the evolution of such D2D networks through time in a dynamic stochastic context, we propose a dynamic potential game and show that its equilibrium behaviors can be achieved through some strategy and payoff learning mechanisms. Simulation results verify our analysis. Using a content delivery application to assess the performance of our proposed scheme, it can be shown that major improvements can be obtained in terms of network delay, content accessibility, and BS load reduction.