A Contract-Based Model for Multiuser Cooperative Relay in Wireless Communication Networks

Cooperative communication utilizes multi-user spatial diversity to improve spectrum efficiency and channel capacity. However, due to the limited wireless network resource, the selfish relay nodes may be unwilling to offer their relay assistance without any extra incentive. In this paper, the incentive issue between multiple wireless nodes’ relay service and multiple sources’ relay selection is investigated. By modelling multi-user cooperative relay as a labour market, a contract model is proposed with the combination of relay power and basic wage. A relay factor is introduced to describe the contract-relay strategy in cooperative communication. To incentivize the relay nodes to participate in multiple sources’ relay efficiently and credibly, an optimization problem of multi-user relay incentive is formulated to obtain the sources’ maximum cooperative utility under the individually rational restraints. By exploiting the hidden convexity of the non-convex problems in both single-source and multi-source scenarios, the efficient iterative algorithms are developed. Numerical results show that the performance of our approach yields a significant enhancement compared with the equal relay-power and equal relay-factor strategies.