Distributed Relay Selection and Power Control for Multiuser Cooperative Communication Networks Using Buyer/Seller Game
The performances in cooperative communications depend on careful resource allocation such as relay selection and power control, but traditional centralized resource allocation needs considerable overhead and signaling to exchange the information for channel estimations. In this paper, we propose a distributed buyer/seller game theoretic framework over multiuser cooperative communication networks to stimulate cooperation and improve the system performance. By employing a two-level game to jointly consider the benefits of source nodes as buyers and relay nodes as sellers, the proposed approach not only helps the source smartly find the relays at relatively better locations and buy optimal amount of power from them, but also helps the competing relays maximize their own utilities by asking the reasonable prices. The game is proved to converge to a unique optimal equilibrium. From the simulation results, the relays in good locations can play more important roles in increasing source node's utility, so the source would like to buy more power from these preferred relays. On the other hand, the relays have to set the proper prices to attract the source's buying because of competition from other relays and selections from the source. Moreover, the distributed game resource allocation can achieve comparable performance compared with the centralized one.