Stimulating Cooperative Diversity in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks through Pricing

This paper addresses the issue of stimulating cooperative diversity, using the amplify-and-forward protocol, among selfish nodes in commercial wireless ad hoc networks. For the relay, cooperation represents both a real cost of energy expenditure and an opportunity cost of possible delays for its own data. Since nodes are selfish, we propose a pricing game that stimulates cooperation via reimbursements to the relay. Specifically, given the price per channel use, the source and relay interact through reimbursement prices, transmitter power control and forwarding/protocol preferences such that their utilities are maximized. Our pricing game is shown to converge to a Nash equilibrium where cooperative diversity is induced at intuitively reasonable network geometries.