Social-aware cooperation among mobile terminals for wireless downlink transmission

This paper investigates the social-aware cooperation (SAC) among mobile terminals (MTs), motivated by the fact that modern smart devices have much improved context awareness. Aware of the social ties, the cooperative network contains two layers of property: social and physical. In order to observe how the social awareness benefit the cooperation performance, we first formulate the social ties between MTs into parameters that can describe the cooperative behaviors by taking the mobility feature into account, defined as the conviction-approval-suspicion (CAS) model. Limited by the processing capability, partner selection is of great practical significance. To this end, the social-aware partner selection strategy is analyzed, and a significant superiority is observed compared to social-unaware selection. By analyzing the cooperative throughput, an explicit relationship between the degrees-of-freedom gain and the social-physical property is finally derived. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis.