A Distributed Algorithm for Bandwidth Resource Sharing in Relay-Aided Wireless Cellular Networks: From the Perspective of Economic Equilibrium Theory

Relay selection, power control and bandwidth allocation for relay nodes are the key issues in exploiting the advantage of cooperative relaying in wireless networks. In this paper, an effective bandwidth resource sharing scheme is proposed for relay-aided cellular networks. Considering a user equipment (UE) can act as a data source as well as a potential relay for other UEs, and a selfish UE is willing to share its resource for relaying purpose only if the cost can be recovered by the payment of the source UEs, we can formulate this cooperative resource sharing problem as an economic market model. Then, the demand-and-supply theory is employed to derive the equilibrium point (EP, i.e., the optimal price charged by the relay UE and the optimal resource purchased by the source) of the market. To assist the UEs to achieve the EP in decentralized network environments, an effective distributed algorithm, based on the excess demand theory, is developed to approach the EP in an iterative manner. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is stability as it can converge to the EP after several (\(<\)15) times iterative computations.