In non-dedicated cooperative relay networks, each node is autonomous and selfish in nature, and thus spontaneous cooperation among nodes is challenged. To stimulate the selfish node to participate in cooperation, a pricing-based cooperation engine using game theory was designed. Firstly, the feasible regions of the charge price and reimbursement price were deduced. Then, the non-cooperative and cooperative games were adopted to analyze the amount of bandwidth that initiating cooperation node(ICN) forwards data through participating cooperation node(PCN) and the amount of bandwidth that PCN helps ICN to relay data. Meanwhile, the Nash equilibrium solutions of cooperation bandwidth allocations(CBAs) were obtained through geometrical interpretation. Secondly, a pricing-based cooperation engine was proposed and a cooperative communication system model with cooperation engines was depicted. Finally, an algorithm based on game theory was proposed to realize the cooperation engine. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the system without pricing-based incentive, the proposed system can significantly improve the ICN's metric measured by bit-per-Joule and increase the PCN's revenue.
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