An Incentive-Aware Lightweight Secure Data Sharing Scheme for D2D Communication in 5G Cellular Networks

Due to the explosion of smart devices, data traffic over cellular networks has seen an exponential rise in recent years. This increase in mobile data traffic has caused an immediate need for offloading traffic from operators. Device-to-Device(D2D) communication is a promising solution to boost the capacity of cellular networks and alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links. However, direct wireless connections between devices in D2D communication are vulnerable to certain security threats. In this paper, we propose an incentive-aware lightweight secure data sharing scheme for D2D communication. We have considered the major security challenges of the data sharing scheme, including data confidentiality, integrity, detecting message modification, and preventing the propagation of malformed data. We have also applied an incentive mechanism to motivate users involvement in the process of data sharing. Actually, D2D communication is highly dependent on user participation in sharing content, so, we apply the concept of virtual check to motivate users(named proxy users)to help the requesting user(client) in the process of obtaining the data. Unlike the previous studies, our proposed protocol is an stateless protocol and does not depend on the users contextual information. Therefore, it can be used at anytime and from anywhere. The security analysis proves that the proposed protocol resists the security attacks and meets the security requirements. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol outperforms the previous works in terms of communication and computation cost. Thus, the proposed protocol is indeed an efficient and practical solution for secure data sharing in D2D communication.