Effective-Capacity Based Auctions for Relay Selection over Wireless Cooperative Communications Networks

Cooperative communication is an efficient technique for mobile wireless networks supporting information transmission through relay nodes, which forward the signal received from a source node to its destination. Applying the cooperative communication in wireless networks can significantly improve the network performance. One of the most important challenges is how to efficiently allocate the access opportunity of a relay node to multiple mobile-users while taking into account the delay-bounded quality of service (QoS) for the time-sensitive multimedia data transmissions. To overcome these difficulties, in this paper we propose a novel game-theory based scheme to resolve the relay node allocation problem by measuring the maximum throughput for time-sensitive multimedia data transmission under a QoS requirement as the effective capacity gain. We formulate this one relay allocation problem as a single-relay-auction such that all mobile-user players can decide whether to patriciate in this relay auction, and the mobile-user player who places the highest bid obtains the relay allocation. The mobile-user players who lose or stay out of the auction can only directly transmit information to their destinations. Then, we derive the optimal strategies for the single-relay-auction, maximizing the payoff (effective capacity gain minus costs) in each bid round.The extensive simulation results obtained validate and evaluate our proposed schemes.