Cooperation Policy Selection for Energy-Constrained Ad Hoc Networks Using Correlated Equilibrium

Abstract

Energy efficiency is crucial for energy-constrained ad hoc networks. Cooperative communication can be applied to significantly reduce energy consumption. Due to the selfishness and the self-organization of nodes, the relay requests can not always be accepted by potential relay nodes with only local information, and the network overall performance can not always be improved in a distributed way. In this work, we present a distributed cooperation policy selection scheme which allows nodes to autonomously make their own cooperation decisions to achieve the global max-min fairness in terms of energy efficiency. Specifically, since the correlated equilibrium can achieve better performance by helping the noncooperative players coordinate their strategies, we model a correlated equilibrium-based cooperation policy selection game, where the individual utility function is designed from the global energy efficiency perspective. We derive the condition under which the correlated equilibrium is Pareto optimal, and propose a distributed algorithm based on the regret matching procedure that converges to the correlated equilibrium. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.