Incentive mechanism design for crowdsourcing-based cooperative transmission

Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) are an attractive way of increasing network throughput, expanding network coverage, and reducing energy consumption, but it may lead to the problems of high cost infrastructure investment and high computational complexity to mobile operators. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the deployment of HetNets in LTE-Advanced system, where the Donor evolved nodeB (DeNB) cooperates with multiple relay nodes (RNs) in a crowdsourcing way. In order to stimulate these RNs, we propose an incentive mechanism by exploiting the game theory. In our incentive mechanism, the DeNB announces rewards to the participating RNs, and the RNs adjusts their transmission strategies, i.e., transmission power. This incentive mechanism can bring about a win-win situation, in which the DeNB can increase its income and the RNs can receive satisfying reward from the cooperative transmission. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed incentive mechanism.