Social-aware resource allocation for multicast device-to-device communications underlying UAV-assisted networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted base stations (BS) can keep the system performance of the cellular networks with device-to-device (D2D) communications in the scenarios that terrestrial BSs are not available. In this paper, the resource allocation is investigated for D2D communications underlaying UAV-assisted cellular networks, where a UAV-assisted BS serves and coordinates multicast D2D clusters and CUs who share common cellular resources. We propose a novel matching-based social-aware resource allocation algorithm (MSARA) for multicast device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying a UAV-assisted cellular network. The proposed MSARA allows the joint exploitation of wireless characteristics and social ties between users for optimizing the overall utilities and improving the data offloading in UAV-assisted cellular networks. This resource allocation problem is formulated as a matching game, in which D2D social clusters and resource blocks (RB) rationally and selfishly negotiate with each other on basis of utility functions to obtain optimal matching. The social context influences the formation of D2D clusters and the preferences of players in matching game. To solve the peer effects caused by interacting between the D2D social clusters sharing the same RB, we define swap operations between D2D social clusters to exchange their matched RBs. The proposed algorithm is proved to converge to a two-sided exchange stable matching between D2D social clusters and RBs. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a good performance gain compared with other schemes in the literature. Moreover, D2D clusters of socially connected users allow a substantially larger data offloading than the social-unaware approach.