Exploiting Social Relationships for Trustworthy D2D Relay in 5G Cellular Networks

The rapid growth of IoT is expected to offer a better quality of life and open up new business applications. However, the huge number of IoT devices are likely to create an immense burden on current wireless networks. Interestingly, next-generation 5G wireless networks envision the usage of mmWave frequencies for a manifold increase in data rates and user capacity. Nevertheless, the inherent LoS in mmWave communications raises significant new challenges in providing seamless coverage across the dense 5G networks. Emerging D2D communications are expected to offer a viable solution for this LoS challenge by providing relay services and extending the coverage. An NLoS device can use direct D2D communications for transmitting the data by using other LoS devices. The selection of relay requires maintaining a certain level of trust and privacy of the content. In this article, we explain that similar to human SN, personal trust among devices can be efficiently used to develop trustworthiness in D2D relay communications. By introducing a new distributed architecture for social relationships in D2D communications, we discuss and analyze new methods for a dynamic social relationship and trust management mechanism. Efficient and trustworthy social D2D relay networks significantly improve the capacity of mmWave 5G wireless networks. Simulation experiments corroborate our improvement in IoT device capacity and throughput. We also present coexistence of the proposed scheme with the existing state-of-the-art relay selection schemes.

Introduction

The seminal works of British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton conceived the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a network of physical objects or things equipped with network connectivity for automatic information exchange, without explicit human intervention. Interestingly, “things” can refer to a wide variety of devices, including smart healthcare devices, biochip transponders on farm animals, automobiles with built-in sensors, and field operation devices for rescue operations. Increasing penetration of embedded devices, the evolution of communication technologies, and the introduction of ultramodern platforms imbued with ubiquitous and pervasive computing are steadily contributing toward the ultimate realization of IoT. However, providing pervasive connectivity to a wide range of things raises significant new challenges. Over the last couple of years, commercial cellular networks have already witnessed explosive growth, fueled by the popularity of the Internet, smartphones, and tablets. Cisco's VNI forecast estimates almost exponential increase in the number of connected devices to approximately 12 billion and sevenfold increase in cellular traffic to more than 40 exabytes per month by 2021 (https://goo.gl/iUhKW7, accessed Aug. 25, 2019).