Bandwidth Exchange for enabling forwarding in wireless access networks

Cooperative forwarding in wireless networks has shown to yield benefits of rate and diversity gains, but it needs to be incentivized due to the energy and delay costs incurred by individual nodes in such cooperation. In this paper we consider an incentive mechanism called Bandwidth Exchange (BE) where the cooperating nodes flexibly exchange the transmission bandwidth (spectrum) as a means of providing incentive for forwarding data. The advent of cognitive radios with the ability to flexibly change their carrier frequency as well as their transmission bandwidth makes this form of incentive particularly attractive compared to other incentive mechanisms that are often based on abstract notions of credit and shared understanding of worth. Specifically, we consider a N-node wireless network and use a Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) mechanism to study the benefits of BE in terms of rate and coverage gains.