Multi-node D2D communications for wireless video delivery over cellular networks

Video service is one of the popular services among mobile users, which plays an important role in network traffic growth and owns the largest data traffic compared to other types of communications. Over the last few years, users’ considerable enthusiasm to watch live video streams has captivated the attention of researchers to the networks equipped with content saving devices. In these devices the video content is saved beforehand within the edge devices (small stations and smart devices) for fast delivery. In this study, we propose a new method for sending video content, based on Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and providing multi-relational and multi-user opportunities. Based on the random nature of the popularity of video content and the random requests from users on the network, the authors investigate the probability of sending content to multiple users using the random distribution of popularity of users simultaneously. In this method, several users’ requests are responded by a single transmission. Extensive simulations result of the proposed method reveals the significant effect of the random distribution of video content popularity and shows that using multi-link D2D connections can cause considerable improvements in the efficiency of the network in terms of the network throughput.