Joint Channel Bandwidth and Power Allocation Game for Selfish Cooperative Relaying Networks

Resource-exchange-based incentive mechanisms are investigated for both selection cooperation (SC) and selection relaying (SR) networks using the cooperative bargaining game approach. Consider a user node that can act as a source as well as a potential relay for other nodes, and it is selfish to share an own resource with others only if the data rate achieved through cooperative relaying is not lower than that achieved without the cooperation by consuming the same amount of the resource. In the SC scenario, only one relay is allotted to a source. Then, a two-person SC game (SCG) is formulated to address the joint bandwidth and power allocation problem for two cooperative nodes. In the SR scenario, a set of relays is allotted to a source. Hence, we propose a one-to-many SR game (SRG) to address the multinode cooperation case. For both SCG and SRG, specific data frame structures are designed to accommodate both the bandwidth resource (in the form of transmission time) and the energy resource (in the form of transmission power) for a cooperative node. To achieve the system efficiency and per-node fairness objectives simultaneously, the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) method is used to solve both SCG and SRG. The existence and uniqueness of the NBS are proved. Moreover, theoretical analysis and simulations are provided to testify as to the effectiveness of the proposed SCG and SRG for efficient and fair resource allocation in the SC and SR scenarios, respectively.