An adaptive power pricing scheme for improved fairness in energy‐constrained cooperative networks

This paper presents an adaptive power pricing scheme to address the fairness issue with relay selection and power allocation in decode‐and‐forward‐based opportunistic relaying networks, which is focused on the scenario where a distributed energy‐constrained cooperative communication system is employed over Rayleigh fading channels. Specifically, the proposed scheme is conducted analytically by obtaining the mathematical expression for the symbol error probability using the statistical characteristic of the signal‐to‐noise ratio, and it also takes the residual energy of nodes into consideration. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme has the advantage of better system reliability and further improves the throughput of the whole network compared with previous algorithms without considering fairness. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.