Coalition games for transmitter cooperation in wireless networks

Cooperation between rational users has emerged as a new networking paradigm to improve the performance of wireless networks. In this paper, transmitter cooperation between wireless nodes in a Gaussian multiple access channel is studied under the framework of coalitional game theory. The stability of the grand coalition, the coalition of all users, is studied by modeling the game in partition form, in contrast to previous approaches using characteristic form games, in scenarios with infinite and finite cooperation capacity between transmitters. In both cases, irrespective of the channel gains, the grand coalition is shown to be the sum rate optimal and stable, in the sense that users do not have any incentive to leave the coalition.