A Measurement-Driven Analysis and Prediction of Content Propagation in the Device-to-Device Social Networks

In the 5 G era, data traffic has been growing rapidly. A small number of popular data files may dominate the network traffic and lead to heavy network congestion. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication can be used for caching and offloading significant data traffic. D2D social networks are instantiated paradigms of D2D communication. Existing studies maximize the performances of caching and offloading in D2D social networks by predicting potential content propagation paths. However, predicting such paths still faces many challenges, such as limitation of user spatial-temporal features, fragility of D2D social networks, and uncertainty of participants. As a solution, we first measure users' multi-dimensional features and content propagation paths to explore the distributions of D2D activities. Then we propose a D2D-LSTM model to predict complete content propagation paths hierarchically and design a prototype-user model for new participants. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performances of D2D-LSTM. D2D-LSTM achieves at most 95% and at least 84.6% average precision in predicting terminal prototype-user class. Tree generation tests show that the generated trees have at most 64% and at least 17% similarity with ground-truth trees.