Sociality-aware resource allocation for device-to-device communications in cellular networks

Exploiting direct transmissions between geographically close mobile users without passing through the base stations, device-to-device (D2D) communications contribute significant improvement to the spectral efficiency of cellular networks. In D2D-assisted cellular networks, the social interaction of mobile users is an important property that will affect the practical performance and should be seriously accounted in the network resource allocation, which is yet to be fully explored. In this study, the authors investigate the social interactions for D2D transmissions and develop a contact time model to characterise the D2D links. A D2D link can be considered for resource allocation only when the two users encounter and their contact time is enough long to complete a meaningful transmission. They formulate and compare both sociality-blind and sociality-aware optimisation problems for resource allocation in D2D-assisted cellular networks. Extensive numerical results are presented, validating that the sociality-aware resource allocation can achieve higher performance than that of the sociality-blind approach.