Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 4417: Relay-Assisted D2D Transmission for Mobile Health Applications (Sensors)

Relay-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, one of the important transmission modes in mobile health systems, can provide high transmission quality for servicing users at the edge of system coverage. However, the quality of the D2D relay communication is largely limited by the relay nodes. When a poor node is selected to assist the source node in the data transmission, it is likely to result in the loss of medical data and inaccurate transmission. Therefore, this paper focuses on how to select relay modes and relay nodes to improve the reliability of medical data transmission. Firstly, in order to eliminate the relay nodes with low energy or poor willingness, the acceptable energy consumption metric of relay nodes is proposed in this paper. The relay mode of each relay node is determined by the acceptable energy consumption metric, which can ensure the physical reliability of the relay communication links. Then a trust metric is proposed to measure the social reliability of each relay link, further excluding the malicious relay nodes. Finally, this paper proposes a relay selection algorithm based on compromise factors (RSCF). With the help of the proposed algorithm, the reliability of the relay communication can be guaranteed, and the spectrum efficiency can be promoted greatly. The simulation results show that the relay nodes selected by RSCF algorithm can greatly improve transmission rate and reliability compared with the traditional relay-assisted D2D communication schemes.