Potential games for improving throughput of social relay networks by multi-user cooperative mobility

With the large-scale mobile Internet promotion, people frequently use social applications, such as Facebook, Instagram, etc., making the social network a valuable research subject in Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. Maintaining high throughput and quality of service (QoS) are vital metrics worthy of exploration. This paper proposes a social-relay ad hoc network model based on multi-user cooperative mobility, consisting of two issues: relay selection scheme and multi– user cooperative mobility strategy. To ensure link stability in the relay selection scheme, we jointly consider social links’ requirements and the probability of successful data transmission in the physical layer. Since the optimization problem is NP– hard, with game theory, we define two strategic games that include relay selection game (RSG) and multi-user mobility game (MMG), to obtain the optimal relay and the best mobility strategy for maximizing throughput. The numerical results show that the proposed potential-game approach yields 13.93%, 81.78%, and 240.83% throughput gain over the previous mid-point selection scheme, random relaying and mobility, and direct transmission, respectively.