An adaptive social-aware device-to-device communication mechanism for wireless networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is an essential element in 5G networks and beyond. It enables users to communicate either directly without network assistance or with minimum signaling through a base station. The enormous number of connected devices to the networks with high velocity of these users increases the complexity of establishing an effective and stable D2D connection when the user is moving among different available peers and modes in the network. So, the main objective for this research was to design an adaptive social-aware D2D communication mechanism to enhance the performance of D2D connection by improving procedures and efficiency of peer and mode selection. The mechanism consists of two schemes, namely the peer and mode selection schemes. The peer selection scheme includes two parts. Firstly, the peer evaluation is based on social choice theory through verifying the relationship between peers, and dividing the available peers into trusted peers and untrusted peers. The technical evaluation is based on HAW algorithm by including multi-attributes related to the connection quality to find the optimum trusted peer while excluding untrusted peers from the ranking. Secondly, the mode selection scheme evaluates the available modes based on the connection status while considering multi-attributes based on SAW algorithm to select and switch among available modes intelligently, based on the highest-ranking, to select the optimum mode. In this study, the proposed scenario considers the status of different numbers of users in the network to evaluate the proposed mechanism, and compared with two other recent approaches. The obtained results showed that the proposed mechanism outperforms other approaches in terms of delay, signal-to-noise ratio, delivery ratio, and throughput with better performance. It provides smooth switching between different modes and employs an automatic peering selection with trusted peers only.