Fair battery power consumption algorithms for relay nodes in rural wireless networks

The increasing data demand of mobile users in the rural environment makes the provision of the Internet access quite challenging. Specialized relay stations can help to enhance the network coverage, but in geographically difficult terrains with users being widely scattered, their usage becomes economically and operationally difficult. In this paper, we propose to utilize the ordinary mobile users located in the coverage area of base station/ access point as relay stations for out-of-range users. Two heuristic algorithms have been developed for relay selection. The first algorithm, Fair Battery Power Consumption (FBPC), uses only consumption of battery power for relay selection utilizing the concept of proportional fairness. The second algorithm is an extension of FBPC using Stackelberg game. Both relay selection algorithms aims at providing the network access to out-of-range users denoted as secondary users (SUs) as well as enforcing all the in-range users termed as primary users (PUs) to participate in the relaying process. The main difference between two algorithms is the incentives given to PUs in the Extended Fair Battery Power Consumption (EFBPC) game. Simulation results show that both FBPC algorithm and EFBPC game outperform the default SINR based relay selection case in terms of fair dissipation of battery power of each PU.