Reversed Stackelberg bandwidth-sharing game for cognitive multi-hop cellular networks

Multi-hop relaying cellular network (MCN) is a recently proposed architecture to preserve the advantages of traditional single-hop cellular networks and ad hoc relaying networks. In MCNs, efficient bandwidth management plays an important role in determining network performance. In this study, a new cognitive radio bandwidth-sharing scheme is proposed based on the reversed Stackelberg game model. In the proposed scheme, base station (BS) and relay stations (RSs) are hierarchically interconnected and interacting with one another to effectively share the wireless bandwidth. By using a trust model, the BS appropriately reacts to selfish RSs to maximise network performance. This approach can promote cooperation with respect to adaptive bandwidth allocation. With a simulation study, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can approximate an optimised solution under widely diverse traffic load intensities.