Resource allocation for wireless cooperative networks: a unified cooperative bargaining game theoretic framework

Wireless cooperative communications require appropriate spectrum allocation (SA) and power allocation (PA) between the source and relay nodes. In this article, we first present an overview of the game theoretic incentive mechanisms for stimulating cooperation among selfish user nodes. Thereafter, the related issues on user payoff function design and the corresponding SA and PA strategies are discussed. To distribute the collective capacity gains among the cooperative nodes efficiently, we analyze and then formulate multiple resource allocation problems including SA, PA, and simultaneous multiresource allocation (SMRA) problems into the unified cooperative bargaining game, and the Nash bargaining solution method is utilized to solve these problems. Moreover, we propose to decompose the SMRA game into multiple single-resource allocation games and then resolve them sequentially. Finally, various game results are compared with a view to highlight that the decomposed SMRA game could obtain a good trade-off between computational complexity and system efficiency.