Cooperative WiFi Tethering Control Algorithm Based on the Meta-Bargaining Approach

Exchange of resources and services over sharing economy networks is attracting increasing interest. In response to this trend, Internet of Things and sharing economy are two emerging paradigms to encourage people to share their assets, which could include personal devices with others. In this study, we propose a novel coordinated WiFi tethering algorithm for a number of mobile devices. Under the dynamic changing WiFi environment, the main issue is to effectively share the limited spectrum resource. To design our tethering algorithm, we adopt four different bargaining solutions, and introduce the meta-bargaining approach to handle comprehensively the spectrum resource. Therefore, we formulate network agents' competitive interactions as a cooperative game model, and they can reach an agreement that gives mutual advantage while maximizing the system performance. To get a fair-efficient WiFi tethering performance, the main novelty of our proposed meta-bargaining approach is to ensure a relevant tradeoff among different bargaining solutions. Some simulation results and numerical analysis are provided to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Specifically, according to our meta-bargaining approach, the device payoff, system throughput and fairness are improved by about 15%, 15% and 20%, respectively, in comparison with existing protocols.