Distributed Relay Pairing for Bandwidth Exchange Based Cooperative Forwarding

This letter develops a distributed algorithm for relay pairing in bandwidth exchange (BE) based cooperative forwarding scenarios, where each node can delegate a fraction of its allocated resources to a neighboring node as an incentive for relaying. Determining the relay pairs that maximize the overall network utility yields a non-bipartite matching problem, which incurs a considerable computational load when implemented in a centralized way. To resolve this challenge, we use a message-passing framework to develop an efficient distributed solution. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches.