Bandwidth Exchange as an Incentive for Relaying

Relay cooperation has been recognized as an important mechanism to enhance connectivity and throughput in multi-hop wireless networks, especially under varying channel conditions. One major problem of relay cooperation is that relaying always incurs energy and possibly delays costs. To a rational and selfish node these costs are worth incurring only if it receives at least comparable returns in the long term. In light of this, this paper proposes a new incentive mechanism called Bandwidth Exchange (BE) where a node can delegate a portion of its bandwidth to another node in exchange for relay cooperation.