Evolution of cooperation in device-to-device communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communications are a promising paradigm to improve spectral efficiency in cellular wireless networks by enabling peer to peer communication. In particular, short D2D links can be used to relay data to reduce the burden on core infrastructure. However, this relies on some mechanism to either enforce or incentivise nodes to donate their resources in order to act as a relay without any guarantee that this will be reciprocated in the future. Indirect reciprocity has been well studied from the perspective of human behaviour, proposing mechanisms and conditions under which such behaviour naturally evolves. In this paper we consider D2D networks that formulate the decision to share resources as a donation game using a model of social comparison and examine the conditions under which cooperation evolves without the need for a central authority. Experimentation shows that the emergence of cooperation is sensitive to network conditions, such as node density and noise.