A Bayesian Game Analysis of Cooperative MAC with Incentive for Wireless Networks

In this paper, we analyze a cooperative medium access scheme in a wireless relaying network using Bayesian games, where the participating nodes are peers subject to the half-duplex constraint and they choose to cooperate or not cooperate based on its expected utility. We first set up a one-stage game and derive the ex-post utility. A two-stage game with incomplete information is further formulated to incorporate an incentive mechanism, which charges the cooperation requester and rewards the helper via adapting their channel access probabilities. We prove that the not-cooperating strategy can always achieve a Nash equilibrium (NE) in one-stage and two-stage games as long as the access cost is constrained. More importantly, we derive the sufficient conditions so that cooperating is an NE strategy and supports higher utility than the not-cooperating strategy. Numerical results are presented to validate our analysis and demonstrate that optimal tuning factors can be determined to ensure NE and maximize system utility.