Cooperative caching game based on social trust for D2D communication networks

SummaryContent sharing via device‐to‐device (D2D) communications has become a promising method to increase system throughput and reduce traffic load. Due to the characteristic of spectrum sharing in D2D network, confidentiality is becoming a key issue in content transmission. Secure communication in D2D networks is generally guaranteed by a physical‐layer security mechanism. However, this method sacrifices the system transmission rate while ensuring security. Since mobile devices are carried by humans, we can leverage their trust relations to enhance the security of communications. As much, considering the psychology structure and social attributes of mobile users, we build a multidimensional trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trust relationship between users, and we pick out the trusted users based on the decision‐theoretic rough sets. By sharing content only between trust users, we can enhance the security of content transmissions without relying on physical‐layer security measures. Meanwhile, content caching is now widely used to improve accessing efficiency and reduce traffic load on cellular networks. However, caching content for other users incurs additional cost, which results in selfish and noncooperative behavior in users. Considering such selfishness, we introduce a cooperative caching game based on multidimensional trust relations to motivate users to cache contents for other devices. In this game, the trust relations and physical distance between two users are considered to formulate the cost function. Furthermore, we introduce an incentive caching algorithm based on social trust to minimize the total cost in the D2D network.