Resource-exchange based cooperation stimulating mechanism for wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, a multi-user cooperative game is proposed to stimulate selfish user nodes to participate in cooperative relaying in wireless ad hoc networks. Without using the traditional reputation-mechanisms or pricing-mechanisms, we resort to the resource-exchange mechanism by assuming a source node could reward the relaying nodes by, in return, forwarding data that are originated from these relaying nodes. Then the cooperation stimulating problem can be formulated as a multi-player cooperative bargaining game. We prove that there exists a unique Nash bargaining solution (NBS) of the game and propose a fast Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO) algorithm to solve the NBS. Simulation results show that the NBS-based incentive strategy achieves social optimality, i.e., all cooperative nodes could achieve significant rate-gains in comparison with direct transmission. Moreover, the relaying nodes could also get fairness rewards by the source node according to the level of contribution that they have made to improve the performance of the source node.