SUITABLE PARTNER SELECTION IN A DECENTRALISED COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION VIA THE BUYER-SELLER GAME

Abstract

The performance and efficiency of a cooperative diversity scheme depend, largely on proper allocation of resources like power and bandwidth. Another important factor to consider is the selection of a proper partner by the source node to help in forwarding information to the destination. In this letter, we look at the concept of relay selection for a distributed communication networks, rather than the more common centralized system where precise channel state information data has to be available at the base station. Also coded cooperation is used as the cooperative scheme rather than the more common amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward system. A type of game known as non-cooperative game is employed in this analysis so as to jointly consider the utilities of the source and relay nodes, where in this case, the source is the buyer while the relay is the seller. The approach enables the source to maximize its benefit (or utility) by selecting to buy power from the relay that would enable it do so. Results show that at a low price, the source node buys more power from the relay, which also increases the utility of the relay itself. It also shows that among a set of relays competing for the attention of a source node, the source will only select a partner (relay) that gives it the highest utility in terms of the resource, i.e power. In this paper, partner and relay are used interchangeably.