EARS: Collaborative Research: Laying the Foundations of Social Network-Aware Cellular Device-to-Device Communications

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Providing ubiquitous access to the rapidly expanding suite of mobile social applications has strained modern-day wireless networks, motivating the need for new technologies to optimize the usage of the scarce radio resources. Device-to-device (D2D) communications between mobile devices over the reliable and pervasive cellular network infrastructure constitutes one of the most promising technologies for further accelerating the penetration of mobile social services. As compared to conventional D2D over short-range and limited-capacity technologies such as Bluetooth, D2D over cellular provides longer transmission ranges, improved spectrum sharing, higher capacities, guaranteed quality-of-service, and a broader range of applications and services. Owing to its promising potential, D2D is now viewed by both academia and standardization bodies as a cornerstone technology in emerging 5th generation (5G) wireless systems.Leveraging cellular D2D for mobile social applications requires addressing a variety of technical challenges that are characterized by a strong interplay between social factors such as content correlation, and wireless features such as network-controlled resource allocation and interference management. This project addresses these challenges by introducing a novel network optimization framework, cognizant of both social and wireless realms, suitable for ensuring the delivery of high-speed, high-quality social networking services over cellular D2D communications. Specifically, new D2D-oriented socio-technological metrics and novel semi-distributed resource allocation and content delivery algorithms will be developed to optimize the quality-of-service of social network-aware D2D systems. In addition, hierarchical resource allocation tools will be introduced to optimize the distribution of social content over D2D while maximizing the spread of data over multiple D2D connections. The results will be evaluated and deployed on two platforms: a large-scale testbed based on open-source Android devices for validating the approach and exploring new social metrics, and a software defined radio platform to analyze the performance of the proposed schemes within a realistic cellular setting.