Section: New Results

Infering friends in the crowd in Device-to-Device communication

Participants : Rafael Costa, Aline Carneiro Viana, Leobino Sampaio [UFBA (Brazil) - Institute of Mathematics] , Artur Ziviani [National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (Brazil)] .

The next generation of mobile phone networks (5G) will have to deal with spectrum bottleneck and other major challenges to serve more users with high-demanding requirements. Among those are higher scalability and data rates, lower latencies and energy consumption plus reliable ubiquitous connectivity. Thus, there is a need for a better spectrum reuse and data offloading in cellular networks while meeting user expectations. According to literature, one of the 10 key enabling technologies for 5G is device-to-device (D2D) communications, an approach based on direct user involvement. Nowadays, mobile devices are attached to human daily life activities, and therefore communication architectures using context and human behavior information are promising for the future. User-centric communication arose as an alternative to increase capillarity and to offload data traffic in cellular networks through opportunistic connections among users. Although having the user as main concern, solutions in the user-centric communication/networking area still do not see the user as an individual, but as a network active element. Hence, these solutions tend to only consider user features that can be measured from the network point of view, ignoring the ones that are intrinsic from human activity (e.g., daily routines, personality traits, etc). In this work, we plan to investigate how human-aspects and behavior can be useful to leverage future device-to-device communication.

This is the PhD thesis subject of Rafael Costa, aiming the design of a methodology to select next-hops in a D2D communication that will be human-aware: i.e., that will consider not only available physical resources at the mobile device of a wireless neighbor, her mobility features and restrictions but also any information allowing to infer how much sharing willing she is. A tutorial paper is under submission to a journal (a TR is in hal-01675445) and a 4h-tutorial was presented at the SBRC 2018 conference (http://www.sbrc2018.ufscar.br/minicurso-1-mc-1/) (the biggest conference on Computer and Network Science in Brazil).

The next step is then the design of forwarding strategies for data offloading through Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, transforming mobile phone neighbors in service providers. The selection of next hops based on mobility behavior, resource capability as well as collaboration constitute the novelty we plan to exploit.