Relay incentive in cooperative communication by exploiting link imbalance

A relay incentive mechanism based on link imbalance(LIABLE) is proposed for the cooperative downlink communication system. In order to encourage nodes to participate in cooperation, the communication resource is offered as a reward to the relay node that participates in data cooperation. Unlike traditional bottleneck elimination methods in multi-hop end-to-end communication, the LIABLE attempts to make use of the bottleneck caused by link imbalance. Moreover, the location and size of the bottleneck can be controlled on demand by adjusting the relay's transmit power, so that the difference of data rates between two hops can be afforded to the relay as a reward. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can provide appropriate compensation to the relay node on premise that the destination's transmission performance is guaranteed. In addition, enhancement of the system spectral efficiency and the relay node's energy efficiency can be realized.