WiFiUS: Social Structure for Cooperative Mobile Networking

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To meet the rapidly growing demand of mobile data traffic, regulatory agencies around the world are actively working on policies and regulations for dynamic spectrum access that are mutually beneficial to the cognitive devices and the licensed spectrum users of the under-utilized spectrum. One of the primary contributors to the explosive mobile traffic growth is the rapid proliferation of mobile social applications. One key observation is that, since mobile networks are designed and deployed to meet the social needs of humans, connections and behaviors of people in the social domain shape the ways in which they access mobile services. With this insight, this project advocates a social-aware approach to enable shared spectrum access, cooperative spectrum sensing and intelligent device-to-device (D2D) communications, by leveraging the social structure among mobile users. Such social trust-based cooperation among mobile devices enables self-organizing networking, and has the potential to achieve substantial gains in spectral efficiency and lead to significant increases in network capacity. By combining theoretical studies with practical applications, this project aims to integrate social elements into the design of cooperative mobile networks, thereby accelerating the evolution of future mobile networks.Under the common theme of exploiting the social structure for cooperative mobile networking, this project is organized into four well-coordinated thrusts: 1) Thrust I focuses on social recommendation-aided dynamic spectrum access by exploring the collective wisdom of secondary users for distributed spectrum sharing; 2) Thrust II investigates social-enhanced D2D communications; 3) Thrust III designs and analyzes collaboration protocols among secondary users; 4) Thrust IV studies social assisted information dissemination in mobile networks. The proposed research is expected to enable a paradigm shift from traditional approaches to social-aware approaches to enable shared spectrum access, cooperative spectrum sensing and intelligent device-to-device (D2D) communications, via exploiting the social structure among mobile users. The broader impacts also include educational elements, such as promoting diversity by providing research opportunities to woman and underrepresented students.