Reputation auction games for cooperative communications over green wireless networks

Realizing energy-efficient wireless communications is essential in facilitating the development of green next-generation wireless networks. Existing studies have shown that cooperative communications can significantly reduce total energy consumption within a network. Most of these studies assume that all nodes in the network transmit cooperatively. However, in practical networks, nodes may act selfishly and refuse to participate. Accordingly, this study proposes a novel reputation auction framework based on an indirect reciprocity concept to stimulate node cooperation in green wireless networks and to provide a means to adapt to changing network dynamics. The proposed framework comprises two sealed-bid auction schemes in which node reputations in single- and multiple-relay transmission scenarios, respectively, are allocated in an efficient and fair manner to generate energy savings from application of the indirect reciprocity model. An analytical model is proposed to evaluate the outage probability of the proposed schemes. The results derived using this model agree with those obtained from computer simulations. Also, an adaptive scheme is proposed to combine the advantages of single- and multiple-relay transmission. Simulations show that the proposed framework achieves higher energy efficiency and a lower outage probability than non-cooperative schemes. Furthermore, the adaptive scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of outage probability.