Multi-Round Auction for Bandwidth Assignment in Relay Transmission

In public wireless networks, plenty of terminals access the Internet through deployed access points (APs). Nevertheless, some of the terminals may not be able to connect to an AP due to its limited coverage and capability. Relay transmission has been shown to be a feasible approach to facilitating the terminals without direct AP connection by encouraging the connected terminals to forward data. This process involves two critical challenges: how to encourage the connected terminals to cooperate and how to assign the bandwidth among disconnected terminals. In this paper, we jointly address these two challenges by designing a multi-round auction scheme, in which each relay/client reacts to systematically changing prices by selecting the best strategy for maximizing own utility. We analytically show that our auction scheme converges to an equilibrium with optimal social welfare of the network.