We consider a network in which several service providers offer wireless access to their respective subscribed customers through potentially multihop routes. If providers cooperate by jointly deploying and pooling their resources, such as spectrum and infrastructure (e.g., base stations) and agree to serve each others' customers, their aggregate payoffs, and individual shares, may substantially increase through opportunistic utilization of resources. The potential of such cooperation can, however, be realized only if each provider intelligently determines with whom it would cooperate, when it would cooperate, and how it would deploy and share its resources during such cooperation. Also, developing a rational basis for sharing the aggregate payoffs is imperative for the stability of the coalitions. We model such cooperation using the theory of transferable payoff coalitional games. We show that the optimum cooperation strategy, which involves the acquisition, deployment, and allocation of the channels and base stations (to customers), can be computed as the solution of a concave or an integer optimization. We next show that the grand coalition is stable in many different settings, i.e., if all providers cooperate, there is always an operating point that maximizes the providers' aggregate payoff, while offering each a share that removes any incentive to split from the coalition. The optimal cooperation strategy and the stabilizing payoff shares can be obtained in polynomial time by respectively solving the primals and the duals of the above optimizations, using distributed computations and limited exchange of confidential information among the providers. Numerical evaluations reveal that cooperation substantially enhances individual providers' payoffs under the optimal cooperation strategy and several different payoff sharing rules.

Efficacy of commercial wireless networks can be substantially enhanced through large-scale cooperation among involved entities such as providers and customers. The success of such cooperation is contingent upon the design of judicious resource allocation strategies that ensure that the individuals' payoffs are commensurate to the resources they offer to the coalition. The resource allocation strategies depend on which entities are decision-makers and whether and how they share their aggregate payoffs. Initially, we consider the scenario where the providers are the only decision-makers and they do not share their payoffs. We formulate the resource allocation problem as a nontransferable payoff coalitional game and show that there exists a cooperation strategy that leaves no incentive for any subset of providers to split from the grand coalition, i.e., the core of the game is nonempty. To compute this cooperation strategy and the corresponding payoffs, we subsequently relate this game and its core to an exchange market setting and its equilibrium, which can be computed by several efficient algorithms. Next, we investigate cooperation when customers are also decision-makers and decide which provider to subscribe to based on whether there is cooperation. We formulate a coalitional game in this setting and show that it has a nonempty core. Finally, we extend the formulations and results to the cases where the payoffs are vectors and can be shared selectively.

We consider a network in which several service providers offer wireless access service to their respective subscribed customers through potentially multi-hop routes. If providers cooperate, i.e., pool their resources, such as spectrum and base stations, and agree to serve each others' customers, their aggregate payoffs, and individual shares, can potentially substantially increase through efficient utilization of resources and statistical multiplexing. The potential of such cooperation can however be realized only if each provider intelligently determines who it would cooperate with, when it would cooperate, and how it would share its resources during such cooperation. Also, when the providers share their aggregate revenues, developing a rational basis for such sharing is imperative for the stability of the coalitions. We model such cooperation using transferable payoff coalitional game theory. We first consider the scenario that locations of the base stations and the channels that each provider can use have already been decided apriori. We show that the optimum cooperation strategy, which involves the allocations of the channels and the base stations to mobile customers, can be obtained as solutions of convex optimizations. We next show that the grand coalition is stable in this case, i.e. if all providers cooperate, there is always an operating point that maximizes the providers' aggregate payoff, while offering each such a share that removes any incentive to split from the coalition. Next, we show that when the providers can choose the locations of their base stations and decide which channels to acquire, the above results hold in important special cases. Finally, we examine cooperation when providers do not share their payoffs, but still share their resources so as to enhance individual payoffs. We show that the grand coalition continues to be stable.