Social-aware resource allocation for vehicle-to-everything communications underlaying cellular networks

With the ever-increasing demand for wireless connections from vehicles, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication has become an emerging technology to enable vehicles to communicate with other vehicles, pedestrians, and communication infrastructures. In the meantime, most communication demands are initiated by human users, whose social-activities and attributes would influence their communication demands and requirements. However, the existing resource allocation schemes for V2X communications mainly focus on the physical domain, and have largely ignored the influence of the social domain. In this paper, we propose a social-aware clustering resource allocation (SACRA) algorithm to maximise the sum vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) capacity while guaranteeing the reliability of all vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links. In SACRA, firstly, we classify all vehicles into different social communities according to their social attributes. Secondly, in each social community, the V2I links are allocated with orthogonal spectrum resources, and the V2V links are divided into different clusters, each sharing the spectrum resource of a distinct V2I link, via a graph partitioning algorithm that minimises the intra-cluster interference. Compared with non-social-aware algorithms, simulation results demonstrate that the sum V2I capacity is improved by our proposed SACRA.