4 - Multiuser Indirect Reciprocity Game for Cooperative Communications

Summary

The viability of cooperative communications depends on the willingness of users to help. Therefore, it is important to study incentive issues when designing such systems. In this chapter, we discuss a cooperation stimulation scheme for multiuser cooperative communications using an indirect reciprocity game. By introducing the notion of reputation and social norms, rational users who care about their future utility are incentivized to cooperate with others. Differently from existing works on reputation-based schemes that mainly rely on experimental verification, the effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated in two steps. First, we conduct a steady-state analysis of the game and show that cooperating with users who have a good reputation can be sustained as an equilibrium when the cost-to-gain ratio is below a certain threshold. Then, by modeling the action spreading at transient states as an evolutionary game, we show that the equilibria we found in the steady-state analysis are stable and can be reached with proper initial conditions. Moreover, we introduce energy detection to handle the possible cheating behaviors of users and study its impact on the indirect reciprocity game.