A Contract-Auction Mechanism for Multi-Relay Cooperative Wireless Networks

Cooperation in wireless systems requires providing proper incentives. Furthermore, relay nodes may not be willing to reveal their channel state information to others, which will result in asymmetry of information. This paper integrates contract theory and auction mechanism to stimulate relays to cooperate and maximize utility of both the source node and the relay node. In the presence of asymmetric information, a novel power allocation and price assignment algorithm is proposed which takes into account the individual power constraint of nodes. The proposed solution is distributed and easy to implement with negligible signaling overhead. Simulation results are presented to quantify the performance of the proposed algorithm.