HERA: An Optimal Relay Assignment Scheme for Cooperative Networks

Exploiting the nature of broadcast and the relaying capability of wireless devices, cooperative communication is becoming a promising technology to increase the channel capacity in wireless networks. In cooperative communication, the scheme for assigning relay nodes to users plays a critical role in the resulting channel capacity. A significant challenge is how to make the scheme robust to selfish and cheating behavior of users while guaranteeing the social optimal system capacity. In this paper, we design an integrated optimal marriage scheme called HERA for cooperative networks. To avoid system performance degradation due to the selfish relay selections by the source nodes, we propose a payment mechanism for charging the source nodes to induce them to converge to the optimal assignment. To prevent relay nodes from manipulating the marriage by reporting transmission power untruthfully, we propose a payment mechanism to pay them for providing relaying service. We also show that HERA is budget-balanced, meaning that the payment collected from source nodes is no smaller than the payment paid to relay nodes.