Incentive Mechanism for Multiuser Cooperative Relaying in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: A Resource-Exchange Based Approach

This paper studies the resource allocation (RA) and the relay selection (RS) problems in cooperative relaying (CR) based multiuser ad hoc networks, and a multiuser cooperative game is proposed to stimulate selfish user nodes to participate in the CR. The novelty of the game scheme lies in that it takes explicit count of that a wireless user can act as a data-source as well as a potential relay for other users. Consider a user has the selfish incentive to consume his/her spectrum resource solely to maximize his/her own data-rate and the selection cooperation (SC) rule which restricts relaying for a user to only one relay is explicitly imposed. To stimulate user nodes to share their energy and spectrum resource efficiently in the Pareto optimal sense, first, we formulate the RA problem for multiuser CR as a bargaining game. By solving the Nash bargaining solution of the game, Pareto optimal RA for cooperative partners can be achieved. Next, to implement the SC-rule imposed RS, a simple heuristic is proposed with the main method being to maintain the long-term priority fairness for cooperative partner selection for each selfish user. The proposed RS with RA (RS-RA) algorithm has a low computational complexity of $O(K^{2})$ , where $K$ is the number of users in a network. Simulation results demonstrate the system efficiency and fairness properties of the proposed bargaining game theoretic RS-RA scheme.