Altruistic Coalition Formation in Cooperative Wireless Networks

In this paper, altruistic coalition formation in cooperative relay networks is studied. The communication is performed over two phases, the broadcasting phase and the cooperation phase. In the broadcasting phase, each node broadcasts its signal in its time-slot, while in the cooperation phase, all the nodes within their coalitions simultaneously relay each others' signals. A distributed merge-and-split algorithm is proposed to allow nodes to form coalitions and improve their total achievable rate. Moreover, the impact of different power allocation criteria is studied, where the sum-of-rates maximizing power allocation is shown to promote altruistic coalition formation and results in the largest coalitions among the different power allocation criteria. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with centralized power allocation and coalition formation, and shown to yield a good tradeoff between network sum-rate and computational complexity.