Distributed Queue-Aware Relay Node Selection for Cooperative Wireless Networks via Vickrey Auction Game

Queue-aware relay selection for the uplink of a user cooperation multiple access wireless network is investigated. To achieve better overall quality-of-service (QoS), the queue states of the relay buffers are considered in the relay selection process. A distributed relay selection mechanism based on a Vickrey auction game is proposed. It is shown that with a strictly positive reserve price, the unique Nash equilibrium of the auction game achieved by a truthful bidding strategy is the best relay response under the queue length constraint. Numerical results show that a significant improvement in QoS provisioning is achieved using the proposed auction-based queue-aware relay selection, compared to fixed relaying and channel-aware relay selection, especially when the relays have high average packet arrival rates. Given a target system packet blocking rate, the proposed scheme helps to better maintain relay buffer queue stability.