A Distributed Political Coalition Formation Framework for Multi-Relay Selection in Cooperative Wireless Networks

In this paper, the problem of multi-relay selection in one-to-many cooperative wireless networks is studied via a political coalition formation game approach. Specifically, each relay node is endowed with some coalitional strength, and the selected coalition consists of a subset of the available relays in the network that is powerful enough to win against any other potential coalition. In addition, the formed “ruling” coalition must be self-enforcing (and hence stable) such that none of its members would split and become the new ruling coalition. A distributed ruling coalition formation algorithm is proposed that selects such stable set of relays with a marginal compromise on network sum-rate performance. Moreover, our proposed algorithm offers a network sum-rate performance/stability tradeoff through formation of political parties of relays, which also reduces complexity and communication overheads. The proposed algorithm is compared with centralized multi-relay selection, as well as other multi-relay selection algorithms from the literature, and is shown to provide comparable network sum rate with the added advantage of network stability.