Contract Theory-Based Cooperative Relay Communication in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Wireless communication technologies have experienced a remarkably fast evolution in the past decade. Current wireless networks face challenges in fulfilling users’ ever-increasing expectations and needs due to recent explosive growth in mobile data traffic, lack of available radio spectrum and unreliable wireless links. Consequently, in recent time the issue of utilizing idle mobile nodes as cooperating relays in cellular networks has drawn significant attention, which is also the foremost motivation behind this research. This thesis presents novel operational mechanisms for relay-based cooperative communication in cellular networks. In relay-assisted cooperative communication, the original direct link breaks into two or more shorter links and relay nodes help forwarding other nodes’ signal to the destination. Such cooperation among users may improve the overall efficiency of the system; however, it requires an incentive mechanism to stimulate potential relay nodes to participate. Moreover, in a cellular network, the Channel State Information (CSI) may not be readily available as global information. Therefore, the ideas of distributed relay selection and resource allocation have become spotlight of many researchers in recent times. Considering these facts, the proposed research here is focused on the design of contract theory-based mechanisms for relay-assisted cooperative communication in cellular systems. Under the proposed techniques, an idle mobile node can serve its neighboring node(s) and receive reimbursement for its participation. At the same time, the proposed contract theory-based approach could stop nodes from cheating behavior, while they hide their CSI from others. Extensive simulation results are carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanisms.