Fairness improves throughput in energy-constrained cooperative Ad-Hoc networks

In ad-hoc networks, cooperative diversity is especially beneficial where the use of multiple antennas may be impractical. There has been a lot of work on improving the peer-to-peer link quality by using advanced coding or power and rate allocation between a single source node and its relays. However, how to fairly and efficiently allocate resources among multiple users and their relays is still unknown. In this paper, a multiuser cooperative protocol is proposed, where a power reward is adopted by each node to evaluate the power contributed to and by others. It will be shown that the proposed fair cooperative protocol (FAP) can significantly improve the fairness performance compared to full cooperation. It is further demonstrated that in energy-constrained cooperative ad-hoc networks, fairness can actually bring significant throughput gains. The tradeoff between fairness and throughput is analyzed and two price-aware protocols, FAP-R and FAP-S, will be further proposed to improve fairness. Simulation results will validate our analysis and show that compared to the direct transmission (i.e., without cooperation) and the full cooperation, our proposed FAP, FAP-R and FAP-S can achieve much better fairness performance along with substantial throughput gains.