A game-theoretic approach to relay selection in cooperative wireless networks

In this paper, distributed relay selection in cooperative wireless networks is modeled as a Chinese restaurant game (CRG). Specifically, the CRG is used to model strategic relay selection decisions of source nodes, taking into account negative network externality due to the potential sharing of relay nodes among source nodes. In turn, a distributed relay selection algorithm is proposed and shown to converge to a Nash Equilibrium grouping. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed distributed algorithm when compared with other relay selection schemes, and demonstrate that it yields a network sum-rate that is comparable with that of centralized relay selection.