SAIL: A Strategy-Proof Auction Mechanism for Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication is a new fashion to alleviate the low channel utilization and signal fading problems in today's wireless network. The success of cooperative communication heavily depends on the efficient assignment of relay resource. Auction theory has been applied successfully to allocate limited resources in wireless network for decades. However, most of the existing auction mechanisms restricted buyers to use simple bidding language, which greatly lowers the social welfare and relay assignment efficiency. In this paper, we model the relay assignment as a combinatorial auction with flexible bidding language and propose SAIL, which is a Strategy-proof and Approximately effIcient combinatoriaL auction for relay assignment in cooperative communication. We show analytically that SAIL is strategy-proof and achieves approximate efficient social welfare. Furthermore, we present evaluation results to show that SAIL achieves a good system performance in terms of social welfare, buyer satisfaction and relay utilization.