Incentive Scheduler Algorithm for Cooperation and Coverage Extension in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we focus on wireless coverage extension and nodes' cooperation. We propose a new protocol based on an incentive approach and a scheduling algorithm to reward cooperative nodes. The cost of cooperation can be prohibitively expensive in terms of quality of service (QoS) and energy consumption, which does not motivate some nodes to cooperate. Therefore, we introduce a percentage of cooperation and QoS parameters in the scheduling algorithm called coverage extension based on incentive scheduling to incite potential mobile relaying nodes to cooperate and, in turn, extend the wireless areas. We use the cross-layer approach to optimize the QoS parameters. The proposed solution not only incites the nodes to cooperate but enhances the QoS by increasing the average throughput and decreasing the delay as well. The simulation results show that the proposed solution not only gives better results than the well-known scheduling algorithms, such as maximum signal-to-noise ratio (MaxSNR) and weighted fair opportunistic (WFO), but allows the cooperative mobile nodes to increase their own throughput by around 114% as well. The total amount of data transmitted out of the cell to extend the coverage can be increased by around 59% compared with the scheduling algorithm MaxSNR.