Coalitions in Cooperative Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper uses coalitional game theory to analyze the stability of cooperative strategies in wireless networks, showing how coalition stability depends on rate sharing schemes and channel conditions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition stability in wireless networks considering both transferable and non-transferable utility schemes.

Findings

Grand coalition is stable when receivers cooperate via joint decoding.

Receiver cooperation stability depends on the type of multiuser detector used.

Transmitter cooperation stability depends on channel gains and jamming strengths.

Abstract

Cooperation between rational users in wireless networks is studied using coalitional game theory. Using the rate achieved by a user as its utility, it is shown that the stable coalition structure, i.e., set of coalitions from which users have no incentives to defect, depends on the manner in which the rate gains are apportioned among the cooperating users. Specifically, the stability of the grand coalition (GC), i.e., the coalition of all users, is studied. Transmitter and receiver cooperation in an interference channel (IC) are studied as illustrative cooperative models to determine the stable coalitions for both flexible (transferable) and fixed (non-transferable) apportioning schemes. It is shown that the stable sum-rate optimal coalition when only receivers cooperate by jointly decoding (transferable) is the GC. The stability of the GC depends on the detector when receivers cooperate using linear multiuser detectors (non-transferable). Transmitter cooperation is studied assuming that all receivers cooperate perfectly and that users outside a coalition act as jammers. The stability of the GC is studied for both the case of perfectly cooperating transmitters (transferrable) and under a partial decode-and-forward strategy (non-transferable). In both cases, the stability is shown to depend on the channel gains and the transmitter jamming strengths.