Toward trusted, social-aware D2D connectivity: Bridging across the technology and sociality realms

Driven by the unprecedented increase of mobile data traffic, D2D communications technology is rapidly moving into the mainstream of the 5G networking landscape. While D2D connectivity originally emerged as a technology enabler for public safety services, it is likely to remain at the heart of the 5G ecosystem by spawning a wide diversity of proximate applications and services. In this work, we argue that the widespread adoption of the direct communications paradigm is unlikely without embracing the concepts of trust and social-aware cooperation between end users and network operators. However, such adoption remains conditional on identifying adequate incentives that engage humans and their connected devices in a plethora of collective activities. To this end, the mission of our research is to advance the vision of social-aware and trusted D2D connectivity, as well as to facilitate its further adoption. We begin by reviewing the various types of underlying incentives with the emphasis on sociality and trust, discuss these factors specifically for humans and for networked devices (machines), and also propose a novel framework allowing construction of much needed incentive-aware D2D applications. Our supportive system-level performance evaluations suggest that trusted and social-aware direct connectivity has the potential to decisively augment network performance. We conclude by outlining the future perspectives of its development across the research and standardization sectors.