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 CRC; 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.