Trusted D2D-based data uploading in in-band narrowband-IoT with social awareness

Fifth generation (5G) systems are expected to introduce a revolution in the ICT domain with innovative networking features, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. Accordingly, in-proximity devices directly communicate with each other, thus avoiding routing the data across the network infrastructure. This innovative technology is deemed to be also of high relevance to support effective heterogeneous objects interconnection within future IoT ecosystems. However, several open challenges shall be solved to achieve a seamless and reliable deployment of proximity-based communications. In this paper, we give a contribution to trust and security enhancements for opportunistic hop-by-hop forwarding schemes that rely on cellular D2D communications. To tackle the presence of malicious nodes in the network, reliability and reputation notions are introduced to model the level of trust among involved devices. To this aim, social-awareness of devices is accounted for, to better support D2D-based multihop content uploading. Our simulative results in small-scale IoT environments, demonstrate that data loss due to malicious nodes can be drastically reduced and gains in uploading time be reached with the proposed solution.