Towards bootstrapping trust in D2D using PGP and reputation mechanism

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has emerged as a new technology, which minimizes data transmission in radio access networks by leveraging direct interaction between nearby mobile devices. D2D communication has a great potential in solving the capacity bottleneck problem of cellular networks by offloading cellular traffic of proximity-based applications to D2D links. This provides several benefits including, but are not limited to, lower transfer delays, higher data rates, and better energy efficiency. However, security in D2D communication, which is equally essential for the success of D2D communication in future networks, is a less investigated topic in literature. In this paper, we propose the combination of the PGP and reputation-based model to bootstrap trust in D2D environments. Our proposal aims at minimizing any suspicious connection with selfish users. Offloading cellular traffic to trusted D2D links provides significant throughput gain over the conventional cellular network. Our results show that the capacity gain can be as high as 133%.