Auction-Based Relay Selection and Power Allocation in Green Relay-Assisted Cellular Networks

Nowadays, wireless communication has become a fabric of our daily life, and it has been a universal demand for higher capacity and longer battery lifetime. For the sake of solving these problems, this paper considers taking the advantage of cooperative communication with the assistance of green relays. So, in this paper, we design an auction market that is composed of one base station (acts as the auctioneer), multiple green relays (act as sellers), and multiple mobile terminals (act as buyers). The terminals need to pay for the cooperative service, and the relays sell it for revenue. In addition, the terminals can raise their bid according to their residual energy; thus the terminals that lack energy have more opportunities to get cooperative service to avoid energy exhaustion. At the same time, the relays can reduce the price based on their instantaneous energy harvesting amount, and, hence, the relays can serve more terminals when they can harvest more energy from the environment. This paper also proposes three different auction rules to show the effect of relay selection. Furthermore, power allocation among relays and terminals is adopted to minimize the power consumption of terminals under the SNR requirement. Simulation results show that the three relay selection rules perform diversely and have their own advantages and disadvantages, but all of them can improve system capacity and prolong the lifetime of the mobile terminals effectively. And, with power allocation, the terminal can utilize the least energy to achieve its SNR requirement.