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

为快速扩展的移动社交应用套件提供无处不在的访问已经使现代无线网络紧张，从而激发了对新技术的需求，以优化稀缺无线电资源的使用。在可靠和普及的蜂窝网络基础设施上，移动设备之间的设备到设备（D2D）通信构成了进一步加速移动社会服务渗透的最有前途的技术之一。与传统的短距离和有限容量的D2D技术（如蓝牙）相比，基于蜂窝的D2D提供更长的传输范围、改进的频谱共享、更高的容量、有保证的服务质量以及更广泛的应用和服务范围。由于其潜力巨大，D2D现在被学术界和标准化机构视为新兴第五代（5G）无线系统的基石技术。将蜂窝D2D用于移动社交应用需要解决各种技术挑战，这些挑战的特点是社交因素（如内容相关性）和无线功能（如网络控制的资源分配和干扰管理）之间的强烈相互作用。该项目通过引入一种新的网络优化框架来解决这些挑战，该框架认识到社交和无线领域，适合于确保通过蜂窝D2D通信提供高速，高质量的社交网络服务。具体来说，新的面向D2D的社会技术指标和新的半分布式资源分配和内容交付算法将被开发出来，以优化社会网络感知D2D系统的服务质量。此外，将引入分层资源分配工具，以优化D2D上的社交内容分布，同时最大限度地在多个D2D连接上传播数据。结果将在两个平台上进行评估和部署：一个基于开源Android设备的大规模测试平台，用于验证方法和探索新的社交指标，以及一个软件定义的无线电平台，用于分析在现实蜂窝设置中提出的方案的性能。

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.