A hierarchical cooperation formation model for downlink data transmission in mobile infostation networks

Mobile infostation network is proposed as a new network paradigm to provide users with wireless data services, and a good tradeoff between the connectivity requirement and economic investment can be achieved. Mobile infostation network can offload delay-tolerant traffic from cellular network leaving more resource for mobile real-time applications. Under the mobile infostation network architecture, content distribution is achieved by exploiting the opportunistic contact among mobile users and infostations. Focusing on such a network scenario, we find that the cooperation among infostations and mobile users can improve the network performance in term of the expected delay of content distribution experienced by the users. More interestingly, jointly taking both levels of cooperation (i.e., among infostations and among mobile users) into account may achieve even better improvement, which inspires us to propose a hierarchical cooperation formation model to analyze and analyze the two-level cooperation in mobile infostation networks. To obtain the stable structure of the two-level cooperation, an implementable distributed algorithm is proposed. The hierarchical cooperation formation model can also provide some insight into other network scenarios, where cooperation is needed to improve the network performance.