Bargaining Game Theoretic Framework for Stimulating Cooperation in Wireless Cooperative Multicast Networks

This Letter proposes a multi-player bargaining game to stimulate selfish receiving nodes to participate in cooperative multicasts (CMs). In the game, the source node can reward the relaying nodes by, in return, forwarding messages originated from the relays. And all the cooperative nodes aim to achieve optimal data-rate gains through the game. Define the cooperative strategy of a node as the number of data-symbols (in one data-frame) that it is willing to relay for the cooperative partner nodes. We can prove that the game has a unique Nash bargaining solution (NBS). Simulation results show that the proposed NBS based CM scheme can achieve Pareto optimal rate allocation among the cooperative nodes. The source node can achieve significant rate-gain in comparison with direct multicast and the relay nodes can also get fair rate-rewards from the source according to the level of contribution that they have made to improve the performance of the source.