Social tie-driven coupling propagation of user awareness and information in Device-to-Device communications

Abstract

Regarding information dissemination in Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, most existing works only consider user awareness as the influencing factor, which cannot accurately reflect the interaction between users and devices. In fact, user awareness and information interaction are inseparable from the social tie that describes the users’ intimacy. In this paper, we propose a social tie-driven coupling propagation dynamical model, taking into account both user awareness diffusion and information transmission. This model includes interprocess interaction factors that fully describe the user–user and user-device interaction behaviors. Through intensive experiments on the real-world Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Facebook datasets with a tailored propagation algorithm, we show that the proposed model has a higher propagation speed and covers a larger propagation range than that of an existing single propagation process model. Our work also reveals that a strong social tie between users will promote the transmission of device information, which further accelerates the diffusion of user awareness.