Social activeness based relay selection: A game theoretic approach

D2D cooperative communication is one of the essential requirements of the next generation networks. As human beings carry D2D devices, their emotions also play a prime role in cooperative data exchange. Several earlier works have discussed the various social factors; none has considered the significance of multiple social networks a user can have contact with. In this paper, we leverage the social contacts of a user with various social networks to decide the next hop relay. We take into account the total friends and their contact duration of each social network to determine the relay that has the maximum potential to disperse the information. By considering these social aspects along with the physical parameters, we developed a utility function to model our problem as a relay selection game. We proved our game model as an exact potential game, which has Nash equilibrium. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better throughput when compared to the conventional methods.