Incentive mechanism in wireless multicast

In wireless multicast systems, cooperative multicast has been shown to be effective in dealing with heterogeneous channel conditions and improving the system performance. However, this mechanism requires users´ voluntary contributions, which cannot be guaranteed since users are selfish and care only about their own performance. To stimulate user cooperation, in this work, we model the interaction among users in the wireless multicast system as a multi-buyer multi-seller price-based game, where users pay to receive relay service and get paid if they forward packets to others. It is a Stackelberg game, and backward induction is used to find the perfect Nash Equilibrium. We formulate the buyers´ game as an evolutionary game and derive the evolutionarily stable strategy. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed incentive mechanism.