Symmetrical cooperative strategies in wireless networks: A cooperative game approach

This paper proposes a cooperative strategy for multi-user symmetrical cooperative communication networks. The cooperative strategy for two users is not suitable for the multi-user networks, where only part of the users participate in cooperation. To solve this problem, first, a multi-user cooperative framework executed in turn is presented and the cooperative condition is established. Second, the users´ maximum feasible cooperative subset is obtained via the admission control algorithm. Then, an optimal bandwidth allocation framework is proposed utilizing NBS (Nash bargaining solution) from cooperative game theory. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy could find the users´ cooperative subset effectively, and obtain better transmission rates than the non-cooperative strategy.