Social-Aware Resource Allocation and Optimization for D2D Communication

The undiminished growth of research activities to converge social awareness with D2D communication has paved the way for facilitating and providing significant benefits to users. Realizing these benefits depends on efficiently addressing several main technical challenges associated with the convergence. Although there are many research studies related to social networks and D2D communication, convergence of these two areas leads to further research efforts to implement social-aware D2D communication. In this article, we discuss recent advances in the domain of D2D communication from the perspective of social-aware resource allocation and optimization. We also categorize and classify the literature by devising a taxonomy based on channel-centric attributes, objectives, solving approaches, networking technologies, characteristics, and communication types. Moreover, we also outline the key requirements with the aim of providing guidelines for the domain researchers and designers to enable the social-aware resource allocation for D2D communication. Several open research challenges are presented as future research directions.