Social community aware long-range link establishment for multi-hop 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 for the next-generation cellular networks. D2D communications consume low energy and enhance system capacity via proximity range transmissions, where multi-hop transmissions are needed for real-time content sharing. Aiming to solve the challenging problem for multi-hop D2D communication networks, existing works only consider physical domain information to create Long-range Links (LLs) to reduce the transmission delay of multi-hop. In contrast, in this paper, we propose social community aware LLs establishment strategy, which exploits the interplay between social network´s features and physical domain constrains. We first formulate the LLs establishment strategy as a cost optimization problem, then propose an efficient optimal greedy algorithm to solve the formulated problem, which is suitable for scenarios of both single sink and distributed content sharing. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed solution decreases the average path length significantly compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.