A coalitional game analysis for selfish packet-forwarding networks

In wireless packet-forwarding networks, selfish nodes always want to maximize their utilities and do not like to help others forward data streams, thus causing severe network performance degradation. To solve the packet-forwarding problem, a novel coalitional game approach based on the selective decode-and-forward (SDF) relaying scheme is proposed. In the game-theoretic analysis, we study the properties and stability of the coalitions and prove that the cohesive behavior can be obtained by the aspect of outage probability. Simulation results show that the proposed SDF coalitional game can enforce cooperation and is beneficial in forming the cooperative groups.