In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic framework for studying the problem of minimizing the completion time of instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) for cooperative data exchange (CDE) in decentralized wireless network. In this configuration, clients cooperate with each other to recover the erased packets without a central controller. Game theory is employed herein as a tool for improving the distributed solution by overcoming the need for a central controller or additional signaling in the system. We model the session by self-interested players in a non-cooperative potential game. The utility function is designed such that increasing individual payoff results in a collective behavior achieving both a desirable system performance in a shared network environment and the Pareto optimal solution. Through extensive simulations, our approach is compared to the best performance that could be found in the conventional point-to-multipoint (PMP) recovery process. Numerical results show that our formulation largely outperforms the conventional PMP scheme in most practical situations and achieves a lower delay.
The advantages of coded cooperative data exchange has been studied in the literature. In this problem, a group of wireless clients are interested in the same set of packets (a multicast scenario). Each client initially holds a subset of packets and wills to obtain its missing packets in a cooperative setting by exchanging packets with its peers. Cooperation via short range transmission links among the clients (which are faster, cheaper and more reliable) is an alternative for retransmissions by the base station. In this paper, we extend the problem of cooperative data exchange to the case of multiple unicasts to a set of n clients, where each client c i is interested in a specific message x i and the clients cooperate with each others to compensate the errors occurred over the downlink. Moreover, our proposed method maintains the secrecy of individuals' messages at the price of a substantially small overhead.