Socially Aware Device-to-multi-device User Grouping for Popular Content Distribution

Abstract

The distribution of popular videos incurs a large amount of traffic at the base stations (BS) of networks. Device-to-multi-device (D2MD) communication has emerged an efficient radio access technology for offloading BS traffic in recent years. However, traditional studies have focused on synchronous user requests whereas asynchronous user requests are more common. Hence, offloading BS traffic in case of asynchronous user requests while considering their time-varying characteristics and the quality of experience (QoE) of video request users (VRUs) is a pressing problem. This paper uses social stability (SS) and video loading duration (VLD)-tolerant property to group VRUs and seed users (SUs) to offload BS traffic. We define the average amount of data transmission (AADT) to measure the network’s capacity for offloading BS traffic. Based on this, we formulate a time-varying bipartite graph matching optimization problem. We decouple the problem into two subproblems which can be solved separately in terms of time and space. Then, we propose the socially aware D2MD user selection (SA-D2MD-S) algorithm based on finite horizon optimal stopping theory, and propose the SA-D2MD user matching (SA-D2MD-M) algorithm to solve the two subproblems. The results of simulations show that our algorithms outperform prevalent algorithms.