Cooperative Routing Via Overlapping Coalition Formation Game In Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperative relaying in cognitive radio networks offers time and space diversity and thereby, provides a useful technique to improve spectrum utilization. Most of the existing research has adopted this technique in single hop communication which may not fully exploit the benefits of cooperative transmissions. So, the essence of multi-hop cooperative relaying cannot be realized from the existing research and needs further investigation. In this work, we consider a network of coexisting primary and secondary users in which their intention to improve throughput via mutual cooperation is formulated as an overlapping coalition formation game. Based on the analysis of the game, we devise mcRoute, a distributed multi-hop coalition based cooperative routing and scheduling algorithm that forms stable coalitions satisfying users' mutual interest. A primary user constructs its routing path in the form of a coalition with secondary users relaying its packet. A secondary user takes part in one or more coalitions by relaying corresponding primary packets and accessing their channels for its own transmission. Finally, we analyze the performance of the algorithm through extensive numerical simulations.