Relay Selection Based on Price Incentive For Device-to-Device Relay Cooperative Communications

Relay selection is the key to the Device-to-Device (D2D) cooperative communication. Since idle users often consider their own privacy, security and other self-contained issues such as the energy consumption of their mobile devices, they’re not willing to participate in cooperative communications as relay nodes. In order to encourage idle nodes to participate, an effective reward mechanism is essential. This paper proposes a relay selection algorithm based on price incentive to encourage self-interested idle nodes to participate in relay cooperative communications. Through adopting the Nash negotiation model of gaming theory and introducing utility function, the utility gain of each node is presented and become the standard to strike the bargains between the source node and relay nodes. After that, the appropriate compensation price are obtained, with which each D2D user can gain more benefits while the fairness among users can also be ensured, then the idle user’s intention to cooperate as a relay user in the D2D communication can be enhanced and the terms whether or not to perform relay cooperative communications can be derived. Simulations show that with the appropriate compensation price and the certain terms, the D2D relay selection algorithm based on price incentives is feasible.