Social welfare maximization for SRSNs using bio-inspired community cooperation mechanism

Abstract

This paper considers social welfare maximization for spatial resource sharing networks (SRSNs), in which multiple autonomous users are spatially located and mutual influence only occurs between nearby users. To cope with a lack of central control and the restriction that only local information is available, a spatial resource sharing game is proposed. However, individual selfishness in traditional game models generally leads to inefficiency and dilemmas. Inspired by local cooperative behavior in biological systems, a community cooperation mechanism (CCM) is proposed to improve the efficiency of the game. Specifically, when a user makes a decision, it maximizes the aggregate payoffs for its local community rather than selfishly consider itself. It is analytically shown that with the bio-inspired CCM, the social optimum of SRSNs is achieved with an exchange of local information. The proposed bio-inspired CCM is very general and can be applied to various communication networks.