Emergent Cooperation for Energy-efficient Connectivity via Wireless Power Transfer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a wireless power transfer-based cooperation protocol for energy-efficient connectivity, incentivizing relay candidates to cooperate truthfully, resulting in significant outage probability and power savings.

Contribution

We develop a Myerson auction-inspired protocol for truthful relay selection in wireless power transfer networks, optimizing energy efficiency under private channel information.

Findings

Over 71% reduction in outage probability with 4 relay candidates

Up to 70% source power savings compared to baseline

Protocol ensures truthful reporting and minimizes power use

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of incentivizing energy-constrained, non-cooperative user equipment (UE) to serve as cooperative relays. We consider a source UE with a non-line-of-sight channel to an access point (AP), where direct communication may be infeasible or may necessitate a substantial transmit power. Other UEs in the vicinity are viewed as relay candidates, and our aim is to enable energy-efficient connectivity for the source, while accounting for the self-interested behavior and private channel state information of these candidates, by allowing the source to ``pay" the candidates via wireless power transfer (WPT). We propose a cooperation-inducing protocol, inspired by Myerson auction theory, which ensures that candidates truthfully report power requirements while minimizing the expected power used by the source. Through rigorous analysis, we establish the regularity of valuations for lognormal fading channels, which allows for the efficient determination of the optimal source transmit power. Extensive simulation experiments, employing real-world communication and WPT parameters, validate our theoretical framework. Our results demonstrate over 71% reduction in outage probability with as few as 4 relay candidates, compared to the non-cooperative scenario, and as much as 70% source power savings compared to a baseline approach, highlighting the efficacy of our proposed methodology.