Vulnerability of D2D Communications from Interconnected Social Networks

In this paper, we study how rumors in Online Social Networks (OSNs) may impact the performance of device-to-device (D2D) communication. As D2D is a new technology, people may choose not to use it when believed in rumors of its negative impacts. Thus, the cellular network with underlaying D2D is vulnerable to OSNs as rumors in OSNs may decrement the throughput of the cellular network in popular content delivery scenarios. To analyze the vulnerability, we introduce the problem of finding the most critical nodes in the OSN such that the throughput of a content delivery scenario is minimized when a rumor starts from those nodes. We then propose an efficient solution to the critical nodes detection problem. The severity of such vulnerability is supported by extensive experiments in various simulation settings, from which we observe up to $40\%$ reduction in network throughput.