FAST: truthful auction with access flexibility for cooperative communications

Abstract

Cooperative communication has great potential to enhance the performance of wireless networks by exploiting relay nodes' spatial diversity. Relay assignment plays a vital role in making the most of this potential. However, most previous studies investigate relay assignment in a rather static manner which may lead to the under-utilisation of relay nodes, especially in the scenarios where source nodes' demands are time varying. Hence, in this study, the authors consider the relay assignment problem for cooperative networks using auction model with access flexibility, i.e. providing sufficient flexibility for source nodes to access relay nodes in time domain. They divide relay nodes' access time into multiple smaller access units and permit each source node to bid for a bundle of desired access units in the auction. This model is formulated as a combinational auction whose winner determination problem is NP hard. They thus present an auction mechanism with an elaborated greed strategy which not only achieves adorable properties such as truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency, but also guarantees near-optimal social welfare. Finally, they conduct extensive evaluations to verify the performance of their mechanism.