Relay Selection for OFDM Wireless Systems under Asymmetric Information: A Contract-Theory Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper applies contract theory to design incentive mechanisms for relay selection in OFDM wireless systems with asymmetric information, improving capacity and reducing signaling overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a contract-theoretic framework for relay selection under asymmetric information, including a heuristic solution that outperforms simple schemes.

Findings

Proposed a contract-based relay selection mechanism for OFDM systems.

Heuristic solution achieves near-optimal capacity performance.

Mechanism requires limited signaling and is easy to implement.

Abstract

User cooperation although improves performance of wireless systems, it requires incentives for the potential cooperating nodes to spend their energy acting as relays. Moreover, these potential relays are better informed than the source about their transmission costs, which depend on the exact channel conditions on their relay-destination links. This results in asymmetry of available information between the source and the relays. In this paper, we use contract theory to tackle the problem of relay selection under asymmetric information in OFDM-based cooperative wireless system that employs decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. We first design incentive compatible offers/contracts, consisting of a menu of payments and desired signal-to-noise-ratios (SNR)s at the destination and then the source broadcasts this menu to nearby mobile nodes. The nearby mobile nodes who are willing to relay notify back the source with the contracts they are willing to accept in each subcarrier. We show that when the source is under a budget constraint, the problem of relay selection in each subcarrier in order to maximize the capacity is a nonlinear non-separable knapsack problem. We propose a heuristic relay selection scheme to solve this problem. We compare the performance of our overall mechanism and the heuristic solution with a simple relay selection scheme and selected numerical results showed that our solution performs better and is close to optimal. The overall mechanism introduced in this paper is simple to implement, requires limited interaction with potential relays and hence requires minimal signalling overhead.