Incentives for cooperative relaying in a simple information-theoretic model

Various cooperative communication schemes have been proposed as a means to increase the capacity of wireless networks. All such schemes assume that users in the network will cooperate perfectly. However, in a decentralized network this assumption is far from true. Users are selfish and care only about their own rates. They can strategically deviate from their agreed role in such cooperative communication schemes leading to a possible degradation for all. In this paper, we study the incentives for cooperative relaying in a simple model, namely the generalized Gaussian relay channel model (or MAC-GF). We characterize all the Nash equilibrium rates and compare it with the Pareto-optimal rates of the generalized Gaussian relay channel model. granted.