Bargaining Game Theoretic Power Control in Selfish Cooperative Relay Networks

Wireless cooperative communications require appropriate power allocation (PA) between the source and relay nodes. In selfish cooperative communication networks, two partner user nodes could help relaying information for each other, but each user node has the incentive to consume his power solely to decrease its own symbol error rate (SER) at the receiver. In this paper, we propose a fair and efficient PA scheme for the decode-and-forward cooperation protocol in selfish cooperative relay networks. We formulate this PA problem as a two-user cooperative bargaining game, and use Nash bargaining solution (NBS) to achieve a win-win strategy for both partner users. Simulation results indicate that the NBS is fair in that the degree of cooperation of a user only depends on how much contribution its partner can make to decrease its SER at the receiver, and efficient in the sense that the SER performance of both users could be improved through the game.