When Social Networks Meet D2D Communications: A Survey

In the last few years, one of the main characteristics of the current technological development is the constantly increasing need for data exchange among various types of devices, both mobile and fixed. Within this context, the direct communications between devices has the potential to create new, location-based peer-to-peer applications and services, as well as to help offload traffic from the congested traditional cellular networks. The main hurdles for this kind of Device to Device (D2D) communications are throughput, spectral efficiency, latency and fairness. Most of these hurdles can be overcome by the use of the new Social IoT (SIoT) paradigm, of things and people involved together in the network, guided autonomously by social relationships following the rules set by their owners. This paper aims to investigate the state of the art of socially-driven D2D communications. Upon an initial analysis, we perform an in-deep literature investigation of the main directions in which social ties can improve D2D communication, draw conclusions and identify the research topics left open.