Adopting bargaining solutions for Bluetooth-based user cooperation

The effectiveness of a cooperation paradigm, simultaneously involving cellular and short-range technologies, has been assessed in different scenarios and for various applications. A sample application is a cooperative file download service whereby a group of users exploits a short-range link to share the costs of a cellular download. Usually, following the optimization of parameters (such as download time, monetary cost, energy consumption) different portions of data are assigned for download to the involved users; they will then cooperatively exchange the content. The differentiation in the task assignment among the terminals has a direct influence on the player payoff distribution, which raises fairness issues in real scenarios where players are rational. In the present work, game theoretic concepts for cooperative games without side payments are investigated and a bargaining problem is studied. Its use in a two-nodes Bluetooth-based cooperative scenario offers suitable solutions to the problem of utility distribution between the nodes.