WiGroup: A Lightweight Cellular-Assisted Device-to-Device Network Formation Framework
Yufeng Wang, Hongxu Zhang, Chiu C. Tan, Xiaojiang Du, Bo Sheng · 2015
Cellular networks will periodically experience instances where the network capacity is insufficient to meet network demand. This paper proposes WiGroup, a group formation algorithm to help cellular networks organize mobile devices into groups to reduce cellular network overhead while limiting disruption to the end user. WiGroup is based on extending device-to-device (D2D) communications, a standard current supported by the cellular network operators, to create device-to-group (D2G) communications. Experimental results indicate that our framework is able to reduce up to 37% of the direct cellular connections. Also, trace-driven results show its ability of consistently reducing direct cellular connections by as high as 28%.