Game Theory Based Cooperative Routing Scheme for 5G Base Station Networks

5G base stations can establish wireless networks through Integrated Access and Backaul (IAB) technology, which enables the information silos formed by disasters to restore public mobile communication rapidly. However, the link quality between base stations that have suffered blockages is severely weakened, thus degrading system reliability. To solve this problem, this study proposes a Game-theory-based Cooperative Routing (GCR) scheme to improve the reliability of end-to-end packet delivery by motivating base stations to cooperate. First, a coalition formation mechanism is designed based on the coalition game model, where neighboring base stations can form coalitions according to network reachability and coalition scale. Coalition members can share the responsibilities and benefits of packet delivery to protect the reliability of multi-hop paths from random blockages. A policy updating mechanism is then designed based on an evolutionary game model, which enables base stations to adaptively adjust the probability of cooperation to promote the selection of a forwarding policy. Simulation results show that this method performs better in terms of average delay, packet loss, and throughput when suffering from blockages. Especially, the end-to-end effective service rate reaches greater than 95%, which proves that it improves system reliability considerably.