Enabling Content-Centric Device-to-Device Communication in the Millimeter-Wave Band

The growth in wireless traffic and mobility of devices have congested the core network significantly. This bottleneck, along with spectrum scarcity, made the conventional cellular networks insufficient for the dissemination of large contents. The ability of content-centric networking (CCN) and device-to-device (D2D) communication in offloading the network and huge unlicensed spectrum at millimeter-wave (mmWave) band, make the integration of CCN with D2D communication in the mmWave band a viable solution to improve the network's throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that enables efficient initialization of CCN-based D2D networks in the mmWave band through addressing decentralized D2D peer association and antenna beamwidth selection. The proposed scheme considers mmWave characteristics such as directional communication and blockage susceptibility. We propose a heuristic peer association algorithm to associate D2D users using context information, including link stability time and content availability. We model the beamwidth selection problem as a potential game and propose a synchronous log-linear learning algorithm to obtain the game's optimal Nash equilibrium. The performance of the proposed scheme in terms of data throughput and transmission efficiency is evaluated through extensive simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves network performance significantly and outperforms other methods in the literature.