DOS by Dynamic Groups: a Coalition Formation Game Perspective

In this paper, the problem of distributed opportunistic scheduling by mobile users is investigated for a wireless cooperative network. Based on coalition formation game model, a theoretic framework is built in which users cooperate in accessing the shared channel in an individual view of average throughput. To analyze users rational behaviors, we propose a coalition formation approach which guides cooperative delivery by mobile users in distributed manner. Under the approach, users form a coalition structure in a dynamic manner, for which an optimal distributed cooperative scheduling strategy is derived maximizing average network throughput. Based on individual utilities, users make their own decisions to join or leave a coalition. To obtain a stable coalition structure, a distributed coalition formation algorithm is designed to adapt coalitions to environmental changes. The effectiveness and efficiency are verified by numerical simulations.