Energy-Aware Incentivized Data Dissemination via Wireless D2D Communications With Weighted Social Communities

Device-to-device (D2D) communications are featured by high energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency, which offers a promising technique for data dissemination over wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that exploits D2D communications to enable efficient data dissemination over wireless networks. To distribute some messages to a target group of users, the base station first identifies the most influential users, called initial sources or seeds, and fulfills their requests. Then, these source devices forward their received messages to remaining users via D2D communications. To incentivize the sources in data forwarding, we propose a monetary auction-based mechanism and a moneyless matching-based mechanism, which can be activated depending on the practical application scenario. The monetary mechanism obtains the global optimal solution and achieves truthfulness, but it involves transfer of monetary rewards. In contrast, the moneyless mechanism enables a lightweight implementation, and it guarantees two-sided stability so that both sides of users in data forwarding are willing to accept the pairing result. To expedite data dissemination, we take advantage of social-awareness in a manner different from many existing approaches. We exploit weighted social relationships, which can be direct or indirect links between any two users in a connected community. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we develop novel schemes to generate and preprocess synthetic and real tracing datasets. Extensive simulation results with both synthetic and real tracing datasets demonstrate that our approaches achieve high utilities.