A game-theoretic approach for cooperative transmission strategy in wireless networks

Cooperative transmission (CT) is a promising technique to improve transmission rate and throughput in wireless networks, and relay node (RN) which could provide a good two-hop channel plays a key role in CT mode. As a result, most of existing work take the advantage of benefit of RN in CT mode, but do not fully recognize its potential adverse effect. In this paper, we investigate the adverse impact called flow-level cooperation interference (FCI) incurred by RN in CT mode, therefore, CT mode may not be beneficial as expected. To this end, we describe our insight and analyze the reason of FCI in wireless networks. To understand and solve FCI, we formulate this problem with a game-theoretic approach, and thus two methods which are named Nash equilibrium cooperative transmission strategy (NECTS) and Bayesian Nash equilibrium cooperative transmission strategy (BNECTS) are proposed, respectively. Our numerical results validate our analytical approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed NECTS and BNECTS.