Power allocation scheme for selfish cooperative communications based on game theory and particle swarm optimizer

In commercial networks, autonomous user nodes operating on batteries are assumed to be selfish to consume their energy solely to maximize their own benefits, e.g., data throughputs. In this letter a two-user cooperative game is proposed to perform the power allocation for selfish cooperative communication networks. In the game, one selfish user node could trade its transmission power for the other ones cooperative relaying directly, and both user nodes are willing to achieve an optimal data-rate increase through cooperative relaying. To find the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) of the game, a low-complexity numerical particle swarm optimizer (PSO) algorithm is also developed. Simulation results indicate that the NBS of the game is efficient, in that both users could experience better performance than they work independently, and fair, in that the degree of cooperation of a user node only depends on how much contribution its partner can make to improve its own performance.