Stochastic Control of Relay Channels With Cooperative and Strategic Users

This paper studies node cooperation in a wireless network from the MAC layer perspective. A simple relay channel with a source, a relay, and a destination node is considered where the source can transmit a packet directly to the destination or transmit through the relay. The tradeoff between average energy and delay is studied by posing the problem as a stochastic dynamical optimization problem. The following two cases are considered: 1) nodes are cooperative and information is decentralized, and 2) nodes are strategic and information is centralized. With decentralized information and cooperative nodes, a structural result is proven that the optimal policy is the solution of a Bellman-type fixed-point equation over a time invariant state space. For specific cost functions reflecting transmission energy consumption and average delay, numerical results are presented showing that a policy found by solving this fixed-point equation outperforms conventionally used time-division multiple access (TDMA) and random access (RA) policies. When nodes are strategic and information is common knowledge, it is shown that cooperation can be induced by exchange of payments between the nodes, imposed by the network designer such that the socially optimal Markov policy corresponding to the centralized solution is the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the resulting dynamic game.