A Layered Coalitional Game Framework of Wireless Relay Network

The wireless relay network (WRN) has recently emerged as an effective way to increase communication capacity and extend a coverage area with low cost. In the WRN, multiple service providers (SPs) can cooperate to share their resources (e.g., relay nodes and spectrum) to achieve higher utility in terms of revenue. Such cooperation can improve the capacity of the WRN and, thus, throughput for terminal devices (TDs). However, this cooperation can be realized only if fair allocation of aggregated utility, which is the sum of the utility of all the cooperative SPs, can be achieved. In this paper, we investigate the WRN consisting of SPs at the upper layer and TDs at the lower layer and present a game-theoretic framework to address the cooperation decision-making problem in the WRN. Specifically, the cooperation of SPs is modeled as an overlapping coalition formation game, in which SPs should form a stable coalitional structure and obtain a fair share of the aggregated utility. We also study the problem of allocating aggregated utility based on the concept of the Shapley value, which stabilizes the cooperation of SPs in the WRN. The cooperation of TDs is modeled as a network formation game, in which TDs establish links among each other to form a stable network structure. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed distributed algorithm obtains the aggregated utility approximating the optimal solutions and achieves good convergence speed.