A cartel maintenance framework to enforce cooperation in wireless networks with selfish users

Abstract-- In distributed wireless networks without centralized control, each user is its own authority to maximize its own performance. This distributed characteristic provides the users with the incentives of greedy competitions for the network resources such as bandwidth and transmission time. Such competitions deteriorate the system performance dramatically and result in low non-cooperative performances. Ensuring cooperation among selfish users can improve the performances and thus becomes an important issue for such wireless networks. In this paper, a Cartel Maintenance repeated game framework is proposed to enforce the cooperation among selfish users. The soul of Cartel Maintenance is to construct contracts among independent individuals for cooperative benefits and non-cooperative punishment, so as to limit inefficient competitions. In the proposed framework, a trigger-punishment game rule is designed to encourage the users to follow the cooperative strategy. First, all users agr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TWC
• Authors: Zhu Han, Zhu Ji, K. J. Ray Liu
• Keywords: Performance, Selfish Users, TWC 2008, Wireless Networks