Price-based power control in relay networks using Stackelberg game

In this paper, we study the problem of price-based power control between a source and a relay node under power constraint at relay side. The relay cooperate in transmission of packets from the source to the destination. The source node benefits from the cooperation rate that relay provides and the relay obtains a revenue for forwarding the information of the source to the destination. The source pays the cost of the power that the relay allocates to it for transmitting the information to destination. The relay works under half duplex mode of operation and transmits information using decode and forward (DF) protocol. The problem is to jointly maximize the utility of source and the relay subject to a maximum power constraint at relay side. The interaction between the source and the relay node is investigated using a non-cooperative game model. The strategic game model which is employed is the well-known Stackelberg game. The relay is considered as leader while the source serves as follower. The Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) of the proposed game is obtained using convex optimization and the closed-form solution is obtained for both the leader and the follower subgames. The numerical results evaluate our price-based power control.