A Coalitional Game-Theoretic Framework for Cooperative Data Exchange Using Instantly Decodable Network Coding

This paper investigates the cooperative data exchange (CDE) scheme using the instantly decodable network coding across energy-constrained devices over the wireless channels. In fact, enabling the CDE brings several challenges, such as how to extend the network lifetime and how to reduce the number of transmissions in order to satisfy the urgent delay requirements. The problem is modeled using the cooperative game theory in partition form. Unlike most existing studies, which are only delay-sensitive, we take into account both the completion time and the consumed energy. We propose a distributed merge-and-split algorithm to allow the wireless nodes to self-organize into the independent disjoint coalitions in a distributed manner. Indeed, the proposed algorithm guarantees reduced energy consumption and minimizes the delay in the resulting clustered network structure. Note that we have considered not only the transmission energy but also the computational energy consumption. Moreover, we focus on the mobility issue and we analyze how, in the proposed framework, the nodes can adapt to the dynamics of the network. Such an important result offers insights into how to design the scalable energy and delay aware CDE framework. The simulation results validate the proposed framework and show that, interestingly, the nodes reduce both the energy consumption and the completion time.