Adaptive midpoint relay selection: Enhancing throughput in D2D communications

D2D communications in cellular networks can leverage social information of users in relay selection to improve its performance. As a relay can be deployed to either extend the range or improve quality of D2D communications, social trust among users in the network can be exploited for selection of relay nodes to yield higher throughput. The analysis of results shows that midpoint relay selection scheme with social trust offers higher throughput compared to hybrid relay selection scheme. It is seen that the maximum of average throughput is significantly dependent on the lower limit of the support rather than how fast the distribution tail decays. Moreover, performance of the scheme is unsatisfactory when social trust among the nodes are high. We have proposed adaptive midpoint relay selection scheme that is designed to achieve the performance of MRSS-ST when the social trust among the nodes are low and achieve the performance of M-Nearest when the social trust are high. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.