Trust-based and social-aware coalition formation game for multihop data uploading in 5G systems

In this paper a trust-based coalition formation game is proposed to design opportunistic hop-by-hop forwarding schemes, relying on cellular . Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, to enhance content uploading services. The User Equipments (UEs) are sources of data to be uploaded to a cellular base station (eNodeB) and are assumed to be . rational self-interested players as they aim at maximizing their own utility. To this aim, the UEs cooperate to opportunistically implement proximity-based data exchanges where the presence of . malicious nodes in the network is a constant threat for the successful cooperation. To cope with this issue, . reliability and . reputation notions are considered to model the level of . trust among the players. Taking inspiration from the recent Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, . social-awareness of the devices is spotted as a key parameter to effectively define the wished trustworthiness. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated through a simulative analysis showing a relevant reduction in the data loss due to malicious behavior of a subset of the devices. In particular, up to 86% reduction in terms of data loss is obtained with respect to the case where the proposed trust model is not implemented. Moreover, the trust-based and social-aware solution also guarantees higher gains in terms of the uploading time for the devices taking part of the cooperative D2D-based content uploading.