Game theory in cooperative communications

Abstract

Cooperative communication has great potential to improve the wireless channel capacity by exploiting the antennas on wireless devices for spatial diversity. However, applications of cooperative communication are barely seen in reality. A main obstacle blocking its wide application is the lack of incentives for wireless nodes to participate in cooperative communication. We first survey the existing game theoretic solutions for providing cooperation incentives in cooperative communications. We then discuss the challenges in applying game theory to cooperative communications.